Spotlight On: Youth Radio's Lissa Soep, Co-Author of Drop That Knowledge

A leader in the youth media field, Lissa recently co-authored Drop That Knowledge: Youth Radio Stories, which offers a portrait of youth media by taking readers behind the scenes at Youth Radio. Add to that lesson ideas, teaching tools, and wrestling with the important and thorny questions at the center of media making, and you have a powerful resource for all of us engaged in youth media.

I suspect I’m not the only one reading this who accidentally landed a youth media career. Many of us started out as journalists or media artists and noticed somewhere along the line that our work got a whole lot more interesting when young people were in the mix. Others began as educators or community organizers, brought digital cameras or audio recorders into our classrooms as a way to engage students, and never stopped. I, for one, was in grad school with plans of becoming a professor when I heard a Youth Radio story on Marketplace (it happened to be by Jacinda Abcarian, who is now Youth Radio’s Executive Director!). I started volunteering in the newsroom while finishing my dissertation and decided there must be a way to combine academic research and teaching with hands-on youth media production. As more and more of us operate at the intersection of youth culture and media--and with digital innovations relentlessly challenging us to think and make in new ways—we’re starting to see the formation of unexpected career pathways, journalistic practices, learning and literacy theories, and social impacts. The folks in the Generation PRX community are, of course, leading much of this work.

My new book, Drop That Knowledge: Youth Radio Stories, charts some of these developments in youth media, by taking readers behind the scenes at Youth Radio. Headquartered in Oakland, California, with bureaus and correspondents in every region of the U.S. and around the world, Youth Radio’s producers collaborate with adult editors on stories distributed through broadcast and digital outlets including National Public Radio, The Huffington Post, and iTunes. I’ve spent the past 10 years (gulp!) working inside Youth Radio’s production company, most recently as Senior Producer and Research Director. The book’s co-author, Vivian Chávez—now a professor at San Francisco State University—is a graduate of Youth News, the organization out of which Youth Radio emerged.

In each chapter of Drop That Knowledge, Vivian and I present a series of Youth Radio stories, detail the negotiations and inquiries that supported their production, and then highlight implications for learning, teaching, journalism, and media justice efforts.


There’s a chapter that compiles methods and tools educators can use to produce media with youth, and another containing full scripts of some of Youth Radio’s most influential and provocative stories. In the appendix, you’ll find a collection of lesson ideas linked to stories from Youth Radio’s archive—a sample from our standards-aligned Teach Youth Radio curriculum resource published on the organization’s website, www.youthradio.org.

Of particular interest to this group, I have a feeling, are the book’s discussions—and there are lots of them!—of the editorial process, both within Youth Radio’s newsroom and with national editors. As Vivian and I say in the introduction, our aim is not to celebrate always getting it right, but to reveal what effort looks like, what trying sounds like. Some of the questions we explore:


All of us doing this work face these kinds of thorny questions and more. The answers are never simple--they are often messy and controversial, and always incomplete. Yet we hope the questioning itself, which is what we take on in the book, fuels new learning for youth producers, their mentors, and their varied publics.