As 17-year-old Temityao Fagbenle puts it, "Once you reach high school, weed is a part of your life." Even if you don't smoke, marijuana is at parties, the corners and parks near schools, and sometimes in school stairwells.  Radio Rookies Temitayo Fagbenle and Gemma Weiner spent the past several months talking to dozens of teenagers who smoke weed about where they buy it, how much they spend on it, and how they think about risk.  Their story airs May 9th, listen here. 

Many teenagers see derogatory, sexual references like slut, whore and ho made by and about our peers on a near-daily basis in our Facebook, Twitter and Instagram feeds. But how do we react? Do we laugh it off and comment, like the majority of the populace? Or do we stick up for our buddies, risking our own image and likability?  Until last week, my answer was the first of the two: I embraced complacency.

According to a group of New York City teenagers, sexually explicit content involving their classmates is a regular occurrence in their social media lives and mostly, they said, they ignored it and kept on scrolling. But they acknowledged that they could do more to limit the bullying and “slut shaming” they see.

Rookies DIY: How to do vox pop

The first in a series of videos we’re creating in partnership with the Hive NYC Learning Network, teaches people to produce their own stories using digital media. This animated short, along with the accompanying resources, will help educators teach interviewing skills to students of all ages.

Check out our Storify presentation from the 2013 Digital Media and Learning Conference to learn how we teach young people to address social issues and personal stories through digital media.  

Radio Rookies' spring multimedia storytelling workshop launched just a few short weeks ago, and students from two high schools in lower Manhattan made their way to the downtown WNYC station for the first meeting.

A two-part conversation on April 4th, 2013, for NYC teenagers about the realities of sexual cyberbullying and what can be done about it.

* Online live chat here on our website during the school day from 1PM-2PM EST

* Teen town hall event after school at WNYC’s Greene Space from 4PM-6PM EST

"The ceremony took hours, but it wasn't until I walked out with my citizenship certificate that I finally felt claimed."

We decided to check in with Rookie Graduates in different communities to ask them how they feel about guns. They rated how easy it is to get a gun in their neighborhood on a scale of 1 to 10 [1 being very easy, 10 being very hard]. 

*Mr. Gonzalez will be a guest on the live-chat on gun control and school safety hosted by Radio Rookies and Youth Radio.The live chat is on January 31, 2012 from 1-2pm EST. 

I am a life-long resident of Bushwick, Brooklyn - a beautiful community besieged by gun violence. Over the years, attempts have been made to loosen the grip violence has on our community, but each initiative has been only a band-aid. Too often, solutions to gun violence in our community are discussed in closed meetings, - and people who look like me, with the baggy jeans, who walk down the street each day wondering if our time has come - aren’t invited.