YH-R Unleashing Students’ Work Throughout Newspaper
September 30, 2008
By SARAH JENKINS
YAKIMA HERALD-REPUBLIC
(Unleashed is) the equivalent of a teen who wants to be a doctor getting to work at a hospital for a couple of years. It’s hands-on. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. And for teens who want to make a difference, it’s an opportunity worth taking. …
With the compilation of opportunities, of course, comes responsibility. It’s a responsibility to devote time and energy to your work and develop strong communication with your editor. But most importantly, it’s a responsibility to properly represent your generation. …
— Wyatt Kanyer, a two-year veteran of the Unleashed program and a 2008 Riverside Christian School graduate, attends Texas Christian University
I hope you’ve read the Unleashed section of this newspaper the last two Tuesdays and the special presentation on this page today.
It has been humbling.
Two Tuesdays ago, the 10th Unleashed team of teenagers from throughout the Yakima Valley introduced itself to you. Then last Tuesday, Unleashed team writers, photographers and illustrators gave you the first of a special package celebrating what we started out calling “the youth section” and what it has meant to local teens over the years.
The second part of that special package is presented on the rest of this page and on Pages 6-7D.
Unleashed taught me to swallow my fears and, at times, my pride. I was a timid 16-year-old when I started writing for the section in 2000. I hated asking questions in class. Even though I wanted to empower people by telling their stories, the idea of interviewing strangers horrified me.
Unleashed put my pains at ease, helping me set aside my feelings, particularly my fears.
— Eloísa Ruano González, a former Unleashed member and a 2002 Davis High School graduate, was hired as a full-time reporter at the Yakima Herald-Republic. She is now a reporter at the Orlando (Fla.) Sentinel.
These columns and reminiscences come from just a small sample of the nearly 350 teenagers who have been members of the Unleashed team since the spring of 1999. Yet I have been moved by what an important role the opportunity played in their high school years, and how grateful they are — for the most part, anyway — in having had the opportunity to be a part of the Unleashed team and the Herald-Republic.
But today’s presentation marks not just the official beginning of Unleashed’s 10th year. It also marks a significant change for the team and for our news organization, and so requires an explanation.
From today on, the news stories, columns, photographs and illustrations produced by members of the Unleashed team will become part of the regular pages of the Herald-Republic, integrated throughout the paper’s regular news columns.
That means that beginning Tuesday, you will not find the Unleashed section in the Herald-Republic. Instead, throughout the week you’ll find Unleashed stories, photos and illustrations — perhaps in sports, perhaps in Home Front, perhaps in Business, perhaps even on the front page. All will be identified with the new Unleashed logo. They will also identify the Unleashed team member responsible by school, just as they do now.
The Unleashed team you met two weeks ago will continue to work with coordinator Adriana Janovich and student editor Alyssa Patrick (now a senior at Eisenhower High School in her fourth year on the team), and they will all meet here once a month to eat pizza, develop story ideas and learn more about being professional journalists.
Being a reporter means taking on a responsibility that not all teens have. Deadlines must be met and expectations must be followed. Interviews and photos have certain rules because it’s our job as writers and photographers to relay accurate news to the readers.
— Colleen Fontana, a junior at Davis High School, is in her third year on the Unleashed team
When I met with the team last week to explain this new approach to them, they were excited about the possibility — and a little afraid, I think, of losing some of their identity as a team. But we don’t intend for that to happen.
Instead of being a segregated section of the printed newspaper, we see them being a more integral part of the daily process. And we hope it will be as fun for you as readers as it should be for us as editors.
That’s just the printed paper, of course. Unleashed has also taken its first steps in a pretty exciting online adventure.
The 2008-09 team includes the first-ever Unleashed webmaster (or, as we call him, the Web kid). That’s Ike senior David Brinkman, who comes into the office a couple of days a week to work on unleashed.yakimablogs.com. It’s still a work in progress, but we expect it to grow and follow its own path, just like so many members of the Unleashed team have.
Journalism as a profession requires great intrigue and inquisitiveness. My role as a writer for Unleashed encouraged those innate qualities, so that I became a young woman of questions and curiosity. To this day, these are among my strongest qualities, and among my faults.
— Alexandra Auld, a 2004 Prosser High School graduate, attends the University of Washington
So what’s happening on Tuesdays?
With Unleashed stories, photos and illustrations integrated into the main news sections of the paper, we will be moving the Outdoors section from Thursday to Tuesday.
This will allow us to do a couple of things:
First, it will give more prominence to some great information presented every week by Outdoors editor Scott Sandsberry, other outdoors writers from throughout the Northwest and popular columns by local outdoors enthusiasts Rob Phillips and Ron Graham.
Second, it will allow us to condense the space devoted to sports on what is the slowest sports day of the week.
And you never know. You may even find an Unleashed article in the Outdoors & Sports section.
But just so you know not everything is positive …
One of the most talked about columnists in Unleashed’s tenure was Drew Toop, a four-year veteran of the team and a 2007 graduate of Davis High School, who now attends Washington State University.
When the call went out to Unleashed alumni for columns commemorating the 10th anniversary, Drew — as always — had something different to say. You can read his entire comment in his column at left, but here’s my favorite part:
I sense that features like Unleashed exist in part to encourage young people to get newspaper subscriptions. To write it openly: Unleashed is intended as a commercial.
The problem with this, however, is that it seems the most avid readers of the section are of older generations.
Thank you, Drew. I and the other older generations will remain avid readers.
• Sarah Jenkins is editor of the Yakima Herald-Republic. If you have a question or concern, you can reach her at 577-7703; P.O. Box 9668, Yakima WA 98909; or sjenkins@yakimaherald.com. You can also comment on this column in the “Inside the Newsroom” blog at editor.yakimablogs.com.
A Look Back, a Look Forward
September 30, 2008
By ALYSSA PATRICK
EISENHOWER HIGH SCHOOL
It was 1998 when a somewhat unconventional idea began to grow in the newsroom at the Yakima Herald-Republic.
Together, an education reporter and a copy editor approached the big desk of Sarah Jenkins, the newspaper’s top editor, to discuss its origin: low readership among young adults.
To fix this problem, the pair wanted to do something a bit fantastical: Develop a section of the newspaper that’s reported, photographed and illustrated by teens for teens.
Jenkins said no. The proposal had the “potential to be a huge time-sucker,” she said.
But Colleen Pohlig and Jeff Garretson, the reporter and the copy editor, persisted until Jenkins, who’s still the top editor at the Herald-Republic, finally said yes.
And thus Unleashed was born.
Pohlig, who left the Herald-Republic for a job at The Seattle Times in 2000, came up with the original idea.
“She needed someone to discuss the idea with, and to help get the management to buy into it, so that’s where I came in,” said Garretson, now the news editor at the Herald-Republic.
The pair attended a conference for youth editors, hosted by what is now the Youth Editorial Alliance, in Spokane in 1998. Afterward, Garretson said, they felt confident in their ability to build a youth section that was equal to, if not better than, those they saw at the conference.
They were so revved up that they wanted to start the section right away. Jenkins made them wait a year.
“In that year, we were able to advertise a ton,” Garretson said. “Colleen went to several different schools to talk to English and journalism classes. She did a good job building a buzz.
“We also were able to talk to the people we had met at the conference, which allowed us to sidestep all the potential pitfalls a program like this could have,” he said. “Without that first year, Unleashed may not have lasted very long.”
When it finally came time to choose the first team, Garretson and Pohlig had to wade through 132 applications from eager students hoping to be a part of the program.
“That was the biggest challenge,” Garretson said. “We had hoped for around 50 or 60 applications, so we were overwhelmed by the large number.”
They had the difficult job of selecting just more than 30 students.
“But in the end,” Garretson said, “that first team really set the mood the next 10 years.”
The co-founders of Unleashed weren’t sure what to expect from the group of young people. In fact, Pohlig listed some of her worries in a column she wrote introducing the new section: “What if they didn’t have any ideas? What if they didn’t like each other?” she wrote.
But when the team met for the first time, the coordinators realized there had been no need to fret: “They truly jelled,” Pohlig wrote.
The 27 reporters and seven photographers had plenty of ideas, got along with each other, and ended up producing a section that earned second place in the “Rookie of the Year” division of an awards program, sponsored by the Newspaper Association of America, to honor teen sections at newspapers nationwide.
Unleashed has been thriving for the past 10 years. Its students have been individually recognized at the national level for their stories, columns, photos and artwork. In recent years, Unleashed has placed second and third for “Program Excellence” by the NAA. It is currently ranked No. 1 in the country.
The next 10 years, however, are going to look much different. With the rising cost of newsprint and the popularity of the Internet as a news source, the newspaper industry has been shifting and adapting. As a result, Jenkins said, newspapers have to re-evaluate their programs, decide what is and what isn’t a luxury.
“Teen sections and the people who run them are fairly easy to cut for many newspapers,” Jenkins said, adding that while teen sections are considered a luxury, the Herald-Republic values Unleashed and considers the section a valuable asset.
“We all believe that we have a commitment to give teens a taste of journalism,” she said. “Whether or not they end up in the field, this experience makes you a better media consumer. It gives you exposure to something you wouldn’t normally be exposed to.”
Still, Unleashed became a topic of discussion during recent meetings at the Herald-Republic regarding how the newspaper can continue to adapt to changes brought on by the Web and the rising cost of newsprint. Editors decided Unleashed, along with a few other sections, needs to be reworked.
Beginning Tuesday, Unleashed will no longer appear as a weekly section in the newspaper. Instead, students’ work will be scattered throughout the regular paper. Their contributions could run in the Northwest Life, Faith, Sports or Home Front sections, even Page One.
It is a drastic change, Garretson said, with exciting new prospects. The Unleashed staff can now “try to get stories and photos into production more than one day of the week,” he said.
“It will also help make another attempt to get young adults to pick up the paper. Maybe an Unleashed story they’re reading in Home Front will be next to another story they end up reading that they would not have seen before.”
In a way, the Unleashed staff will be working more like the Herald-Republic staff, competing for front page and other space in the newspaper, Garretson said. The change will also encourage the Unleashed staff to write stories that are more relevant to a general newspaper audience, he said.
“Unleashed is losing its stand-alone identity,” Jenkins said. “And I am sad about that, but at the same time I’m excited about being able to use the section’s strong content throughout the paper. This is an opportunity for stories to be in places they’ve never been before.”
Part of Unleashed’s new format includes responding to the newspaper industry’s push to the Web. Unleashed launched a blog at the end of May, and named its first webmaster — David Brinkman, a 17-year-old senior at Eisenhower High School — about the same time.
“My plan is to make the news more teen-friendly,” Brinkman said. “I’ll be creating a MySpace and Facebook page because teens are more comfortable reading information that way.”
Brinkman will also work on making Unleashed’s blog more interactive, adding polls in addition to the comment option that’s already available. He will work closely with Herald-Republic Web producer TJ Mullinax and Unleashed coordinator Adriana Janovich. Janovich, a Herald-Republic reporter since 2000, has coordinated the Unleashed section for the past six years.
Unleashed has shifted with each of its four coordinators and 10 teams of students who have moved through its pages. Now, it will shift again to accommodate trends in the newspaper industry.
Unleashed is moving into a new phase of its existence. But its foundation will always be the same: A strong core of young people ready to unleash their voices.
Who’s Been Reading this Teen Section? Surprisingly, Adults
September 30, 2008
By ALYSSA PATRICK
EISENHOWER HIGH SCHOOL
During the past 10 years, Unleashed has picked up an unexpected audience: grown-ups.
Turns out everyone from parents and teachers to other community members and leaders seems to like to see what teens have to say.
While this wasn’t the intended effect of Unleashed, it was a nice surprise. In fact, it even makes sense; those who seem most interested in the teen-produced section are those who want to better understand the opinions and actions of teens.
“It gave us the privilege of hearing from young people across Yakima County and helped us to remember that the process of becoming a citizen with a voice in the community starts at a very young age,” said 59-year-old Barbara Greenberg, former president of the Yakima school board.
Greenberg has been an avid reader of Unleashed since its first edition in 1999. Later, her daughter, Katie Greenberg, a 2006 Davis High School graduate, wrote for Unleashed.
“I take my hat off to the Herald for providing leadership and for creating Unleashed,” Greenberg said. “I think any community that does not listen to the voice of its young people is missing a very large and important segment of the population as it considers where it is and where it should be going. … ”
Carol Mills, a 62-year-old social studies teacher at Eisenhower High School, has also been a fan of Unleashed since Day One.
“It shows the many dimensions of young people, displays their culture, and is overall well-written and accurate,” said Mills, who serves as the school’s yearbook adviser. Many of her students have gone through the Unleashed program.
So have students at La Salle High School, where 39-year-old campus ministry teacher Ted Kanelopoulos has used the teen section in his classroom.
“If we are discussing controversial topics in class, I will often bring in a related article to add something else to consider,” he said.
And the past 10 years have definitely offered a wide variety of topics that have stirred up conversation throughout the Yakima Valley.
One of Unleashed’s first staffers wrote a column about what it was like to be a teen mother. Another wrote an opinion piece that criticized President Bush. Both pieces drew letters to the editor from numerous disgruntled readers.
For Mills, that’s one of the best parts of Unleashed.
“Letters to the editor will either comment on how great the staff is doing, or challenge a reporter’s position,” she said. “They start a conversation with the student, which is a great experience for him or her, and a nice representation that the community is reading and responding to Unleashed.”
A Confidence-Booster and a Catalyst for Change
September 30, 2008
By ALYSSA PATRICK
EISENHOWER HIGH SCHOOL
Three years and four months ago, my name appeared for the first time on the inside back page of the sports section of this newspaper.
There it was, proudly sitting atop my first published piece. I was in the eighth grade still, not even a high schooler yet. Not driving, not going to prom, not thinking about college, and yet I was a published journalist.
What a sparkling moment that was. But the beauty of Unleashed is, that wasn’t even the best part.
Being published in the newspaper is always a rewarding feeling, but this program has given me so much more than just a byline. It has helped to shape me.
My very first real news story took me about five leagues out of my comfort realm. I was a freshman ballet dancer who loved to read, and I was headed to a skate park for the first time in my life. Nerves fluttered through my body as my dad drove me down 40th Avenue, not because I was scared of the people who would be at the park, but because I was scared of what they would think of me.
I felt so vastly different from my idea of a “skater,” yet I was supposed to not only talk to them, but ask them questions about their lives. The story was about a man who barbecued every Sunday for free at the park. Of course, my first mission was to talk to him, and luckily I found him right away. We ended up talking for about an hour, and I grew more and more comfortable by the minute.
“What a fascinating person!” I thought. “Look at how much time he is willing to put in for these kids, look at how caring he is.” And after I talked to him, I talked to the “skaters,” who turned out to be just people. People who followed their hobby with great zeal, people who appreciated the warm smiles and burgers of a man who genuinely cared about their well-being.
I learned a tremendous amount that day — about myself, about others, about life in general. These are lessons I would have missed without Unleashed.
And over the years I’ve learned even more, especially from the people I have encountered.
It seems the part I always dreaded most, calling a source for an interview, always ended up being the most rewarding. Being a journalist allows me to get into people’s lives, to hear and be trusted with their stories. Sure, I may have met Michelle Wyles at a community event of some sort, but I would never have learned how she was an antique dealer before she settled down as a small business owner if I hadn’t been working on a story about her store, Garden Dance.
I may have seen Azalea Koestler in a play at Yakima Valley Community College one day, but I would not have had the chance to sit comfortably in her home and watch her speak so maturely about her theatrical life if I had not been writing a profile about her.
Yakima has such a stunning variety of people with interesting stories to tell, with passions and opinions to share. Talking with an assorted handful of these people has opened my eyes to the uniqueness of this community, and granted me the ability to appreciate it long before I would have without Unleashed.
Working as the student editor has also assisted in cultivating my respect for all things Yakima-made, especially this newspaper. A couple days a week, I get to spend my time among reporters, photographers, editors and many other people who work so hard for an industry and community that they believe in.
They stretch themselves out as much as possible to objectively cover all aspects of every issue that may be interesting or important to a town like Yakima. They work odd hours, have frequent meetings in order to keep altering and adapting to changes, constantly learn new technology, share their rewarding interviews, work aptly on deadline, and keep a sense of humor through it all.
I’ve learned so much about how I want to live my life by merely being in the same room with them.
In three years and four months, my writing skills have improved, my attention to detail has blossomed, my understanding has broadened, and my confidence has taken several steps upward. Unleashed is the catalyst that allowed all of those changes.
Thank you, Unleashed.
— Alyssa Patrick, a senior at Eisenhower High School, is in her fourth year on the Unleashed team. She is also in her second year as the student editor of Unleashed.
Manna from Heaven for a Sports-Averse Teenager
September 30, 2008
By ALEX FRANK
FOR UNLEASHED
Narrowing it down to a single, earthshaking turning point isn’t easy.
There was my first at-bat in Little League, when I was beaned in the back by a 45 mph fastball courtesy of my best friend. I got on base and, eventually, attempted to score a run that, unbeknownst to me as I shot a celebratory finger skyward, had been rendered null by a third out, long before my cleated foot trod that big plastic hunk. We were the Red Sox, but at that point, I was the star player of the Red Cheex.
Still, I don’t think that was the event.
I’m pretty sure that moment came when I was 10, during a YMCA basketball game. Through some miraculous mental slip by one of my teammates, I was given the ball after a particularly hardscrabble series of rebounds.
Dopily smacking the ball downcourt, I clod across the parquet of the third-floor gym, lacing the classic Clyde Drexler crossover lay-in that I had practiced so many times in my driveway. As the ball dropped through the impossibly high net, I wondered briefly why it had been so easy, as, up to that point, even two points in a game was for me a massive achievement.
That brief sense of wonder at my own burst of athletic skill was brought crashing earthward when I heard a chorus of high-pitched 10-year-old teammates screaming at me for draining that beautiful shot in the wrong hoop. I had scored for the other team. Van Gogh sunsets have seen less crimson than my face at that moment.
So, I became a writer.
If lay-ins and home runs weren’t going to be my thing, why fight it? Thus, it’s with eternal gratitude that I acknowledge the Yakima Herald-Republic for establishing Unleashed, essentially the finest nonsports team that a smart-but-clumsy kid with a gift for writing could ask for; and my mother, for pushing a then-reluctant eighth-grader to apply for a position.
While I doubt many of my peers on Unleashed shared my shame-ridden youth sports history (which, to this day, turns my bearded cheeks a bit red), they did partake in what was undeniably a defining element in my adolescence.
Not only did I learn how to report and write from some of the best mentors a burgeoning journalist could’ve asked for — serious props to Maisy Fernandez, John Taylor, Adriana Janovich, Jane Gargas and Kim Nowacki — I developed an evaluative, questioning mind that I maintain today. I made great friends with many of my fellow Unleashed staffers, and shamelessly macked on the cute girls. The fact that I ended up as a journalist throughout college almost seems secondary to the amazing experiences Unleashed provided me in my teens.
From shaky interviews with my punk-rock heroes, to sorta-satiric columns about well-known Time magazine writers who ended up actually writing me back, to congratulations from parents’ friends who I barely recognized about a story that I somehow forgot would be read by more than 40,000 people, Unleashed became for me what traditional high-school activities — yes, varsity athletics, I’m looking at you — could never have been: a source of undiluted, well-earned pride. My cheeks were red, but for entirely different, entirely better reasons.
Just as importantly, Unleashed gave me a sense of belonging. Punk bands and goofy school plays aside, writing was my thing. When I arrived at a big, scary Midwestern university’s journalism school, the kid from an unpronounceable town on the wrong side of a remote state’s mountains, I found I could hack it. And when I ditched the journalism degree for a crunchy liberal arts education a little closer to home, my background as a reporter not only helped me with that unending torrent of papers bestowed upon English majors, but kept me marginally employed as a freelance music writer and section editor of the student newspaper.
So, Unleashed, here’s to you.
You transformed me from a 14-year-old, journalistically inclined failure at sports into a 23-year-old writer with an eternally inquisitive mind and strong sense of confidence, who, undoubtedly, is still a failure at sports. I fell in and out of love across the pizza crust-strewn tables at your meetings, and learned about who I was, and am, while faced with a blank Word document’s blinking cursor, struggling to meet your deadlines. You gave me a place to belong, an identity, and, above all, something to call my own.
Now, who’s blushing?
— Alex Frank, a 2003 Davis High School graduate, was a member of Unleashed’s inaugural team. He also served as student editor of the section.
The Best Training Ground for Tackling Difficult Stories
September 30, 2008
By ELOÍSA RUANO GONZÁLEZ
ORLANDO SENTINEL
I’ve always feared vultures.
Perhaps it’s because of an old family superstition that the carnivorous bird brings death. Albert Hitchcock’s movie “The Birds” may also have been responsible for this bizarre phobia.
Last spring, though, I found myself standing under hundreds of vultures that were ravaging a small town in central Florida. My fears swelled when I discovered a tornado sweeping nearby.
Are the vultures warning me about something? I wondered. I was ready to flee, but it was the residents’ frustrations and my sense of duty to report their problem that kept me grounded.
The vultures were roosting in their neighborhood. They were ripping rooftop shingles, gnawing on rubber linings on car windows and regurgitating their “meals,” and defecating on vehicles, rooftops, sidewalks and trees.
They had been there for years, but the problem amplified when hundreds more joined the roost and residents found little to no options in getting rid of them. People weren’t even allowed to shoo away the federally protected birds, which were also protected by a city ordinance.
Courage and a strong stomach, keys to tackling good stories, kept me there — just like they kept me at an assignment at a national rowing event in Delaware. I didn’t know how to swim and was terrified of large bodies of water, yet I had to write about first-time rowers. After partially plunging into the river and ripping my pants after falling out of a boat while on assignment, I learned that water and humiliation aren’t all that bad.
Unleashed taught me to swallow my fears and, at times, my pride. I was a timid 16-year-old when I started writing for the section in 2000. I hated asking questions in class. Even though I wanted to empower people by telling their stories, the idea of interviewing strangers horrified me.
Unleashed put my pains at ease, helping me set aside my feelings, particularly my fears. I learned to be more confident and interview classmates, teachers and other professionals in the community without hyperventilating.
I’ve carried these lessons with me to each newspaper I’ve worked at, including the Yakima Herald-Republic, where I became the first Unleashed alumna to return as a full-time reporter. I stayed in Yakima for a year and a half before taking a job with the Orlando Sentinel last December.
Not only has Unleashed empowered people by giving them an outlet to share their creativity, experiences and opinions, but it also strengthened me by helping me find the courage to tackle even the most difficult stories.
The toughest part of a reporter’s job is staying calm while interviewing a person whose life has been ripped apart after a tragedy.
Earlier this year at the Orlando Sentinel, I covered a 70-car pileup on a major interstate where nearly 40 people were injured and at least five were killed. Tractor-trailers had overturned and cars were crushed like tin cans.
I ended up sitting on a front porch with a Honduran man who survived the early morning accident after he was ripped out of his van as he was heading to work with friends and relatives. His older brother, though, didn’t survive.
Although the 25-year-old man and his relatives feared they would lose their jobs after suffering fractured bones and sore backs and were unable to work, they were more concerned about finding a way to pay to fly their relative’s body back to Honduras so his four children, ages 10, 8, 7 and 1 1?2, could say goodbye.
It was a difficult story, but an important one to tell. The man wanted to publicly hold state wildlife officials accountable for his brother’s death after they lost control of a fire they ignited several hours before to burn dangerously dry brush near the interstate. And residents wanted to understand what happened that foggy, smoky morning.
It’s the small accomplishments, such as facing water and vulture phobias, that can prepare you for the more important stories, like a 70-car pileup. And programs like Unleashed are the ones that get you there.
— Eloísa Ruano González, a 2002 Davis High School graduate, was the first (and so far, only) former Unleashed student hired as a full-time reporter at the Yakima Herald-Republic. She is now working as a reporter at the Orlando Sentinel in Florida.
A Launch Pad for the Valley’s Young Talent
September 30, 2008
By DREW TOOP
WASHINGTON STATE UNIVERSITY
I’ve only been off the team for, oh, how long has it been? A year and some months, I believe. My experiences on Unleashed, I think, have influenced me greatly.
However, I’ve already said as much in these pages, so I won’t write too long.
I remember my first Unleashed meeting, probably looking very, very young and wondering what I would make of myself during my time on the team, not knowing that I would reapply for further years nor write so much.
My younger self didn’t think about the possibility that Unleashed would be a fixture of my teenage years. In fact, when I had the opportunity to become a columnist, I was excited, but yet I remember not thinking much of it. I was floating, really.
During the time I was on the team, and since I have been off, the Yakima Herald-Republic, like almost all newspapers in the United States, has gotten smaller, because “nobody reads newspapers anymore.”
I sense that features like Unleashed exist in part to encourage young people to get newspaper subscriptions. To write it openly: Unleashed is intended as a commercial.
The problem with this, however, is that it seems the most avid readers of the section are of older generations.
I know that many young people do read Unleashed, and that stories and columns from it are often studied in high school English classes. But it seems that overall, the section has failed to do what was intended, simply because it could never do what was intended.
The decline of the daily is going to reach its inevitable end about 20 years from now, if not earlier.
What good, then, is Unleashed?
Just because youth pages won’t save newspapers is no reason to ignore or remove them, especially one of such quality as ours. Unleashed serves a much more important purpose in that it gathers together a good sampling of the next generation of writers, artists and photographers and pushes their skills forward.
It is the launch pad for the Yakima Valley’s young talent. Let’s face it: There are very few cultural venues in the Valley, especially ones easily accessible to young people.
Unleashed helps fill a void.
It also builds friendships. I am especially grateful to Unleashed for introducing me to one of the best people in the world, my good friend Desiree Pebeahsy, a 2008 White Swan High School graduate.
We’re both kids from the launch pad, and we both owe it to the page for the encouragement it gave us. I can only hope that others will say the same for some years to come.
— Drew Toop, a four-year veteran of the Unleashed team and a 2007 graduate of Davis High School, attends Washington State University.
An Outlet for Teenage Subversiveness
September 30, 2008
By WALTER SCHLECT
WASHINGTON STATE UNIVERSITY
Two and a half years ago, for reasons I no longer remember, I became curious to see if there was ever a Communist Party in Yakima.
My curiosity was not so large that I went to the headquarters of this newspaper, which I wrote for at the time, to search the archives, or to the museum, to investigate historical documents, or even to the library, to see if anybody had already dug up the information and published it in a book.
Instead, I lazily went to Google and put in several combinations of search terms, including, but not limited to, “communism” and “Yakima.”
The search could not have lasted longer than 15 minutes. I came up with several useless Web pages until I narrowed the search so that only a handful of these sites showed up. One seemed to be what I was looking for.
It was about McCarthyism in the 1950s and had something to do with Yakima. I found it at the Yakima Herald-Republic Web site, clicked on it, started to skim it, and soon realized it wouldn’t help me, because it was just about Edward R. Murrow’s journalism campaign against former senator Joseph McCarthy. It was something I already knew about, having written a movie review of “Good Night, and Good Luck,” a fictional account of the event.
Then it hit me: I was reading the very movie review I had written.
My year with Unleashed offered me experience, work ethic, better writing skills and many other things adults approve of in a youth activity. These things are very valuable, of course, but looking back at the experience, nothing was more pleasurable than that tiny moment I felt finding my article in a subversive search.
To be subversive is the goal of every respectable teenager, and I felt, for a moment, that I had achieved it. It’s almost dangerous the kind of free rein given to Unleashed reporters. I could write an objective article, or I could write my opinion. I could write a favorable review of a work of art, or a negative review of something far below art.
So many more people than I had expected read the section. I realized this when teachers and acquaintances would comment to me about something I had written. I was always shy about this public recognition and would usually change the subject. I hadn’t really found a voice yet, and sometimes I felt uncomfortable that my developing voice was being published for the community to see.
Sometimes, I felt Unleashed should be an underground journal. But the Communist Internet search made me realize how wonderfully subversive the experience was, and what made if more subversive was that it was there for everyone who was searching for the history of the Communist Party in Yakima County to see.
I still haven’t found my own voice, and I still don’t know what I want to be, but having the opportunity to write for Unleashed meant that it didn’t matter. There was a power in the unknown, and as I write this, I’m beginning to remember what that was like.
— Walter Schlect, a 2006 graduate of West Valley High School, is a junior at Washington State University. He served on Unleashed his senior year of high school.
“The Chuck” Meets “The Oliva”
September 25, 2008
Chuck Klosterman has read Unleashed!
(Or at least one Unleashed story — an award-winning Unleashed story.)
To learn more, click on Olivia’s Music Blog at the right-hand side of this page.
— Olivia Hernandez, a 2008 Davis High School graduate and four-year Unleashed veteran, is a freshman at Seattle University.
Grateful for Unleashed
September 25, 2008
Unleashed got a letter to the editor!
To the editor — Recently I picked up my son’s yearbook. In looking at the activities he listed by his senior picture I noted “Unleashed” among others. I smiled and reflected on his years as an Unleashed reporter. The Yakima Herald-Republic is to be commended for this award-winning section. As a parent I cannot thank you enough for the contribution to my son’s life through the participation in Unleashed.
Over the years many people commented to me after reading his articles, the majority of them were my age, 49 or older. I was told time and time again how they eagerly they anticipated the Unleashed section each Tuesday. They loved reading the views of the younger generation and they were impressed with the intellect and skill of the young writers.
With the changes in the newspaper industry today, it is wonderful for these teens, some of whom might be interested in journalism as a career, to have a section of their own. It undergirds the value of words on paper. Students involved in Unleashed have the advantage of holding, seeing and touching their own written word.
Long live Unleashed.
LAURIE A.D. KANYER
Laurie Kanyer is the mother of Wyatt Kanyer, a freshman at Texas Christian University and a 2008 graduate of Riverside Christian School. He served on the Unleashed team for two years.
This letter was published in the Yakima Herald-Republic on Wednesday, Sept. 24.
