McKnight is a staff writer for the Web-based periodical, HarlemLive . He and 30 other teens work closely to produce a vibrant snapshot of the social, political, aesthetic and historical view of Harlem through digital pictures, clickable maps, streaming video, online surveys and, most of all, writing. The group gathers at noon, six days a week in the summer, and after 5 p.m. during the school year, at the headquarters of Playing2Win, 111th Street and Fifth Avenue in Harlem, a community technology center created by Columbia University's Teachers College and Boys Harbor, a youth organization. They stay as long as their parents let them, an average of nine hours a week, or longer if they are in an internship or summer youth employment program. The atmosphere at HarlemLive is the controlled chaos of a metropolitan newsroom.
Standards are high and deadlines loom.
The group is expected to post two to four new stories a week and change the home page images every three days. Enita Okodiko tries out titles for a new story on summer internships written by his colleague Erika Fernandez, while Justin Young feathers some pixels in his latest Web cartoon. Every chair is occupied, every laptop booted up and every digital camera charged for action. The mood of a hard-nosed newsroom derives directly from the early journalism efforts of Richard Calton at New York City Public School 206. He began with a hardcopy, student-run newspaper from his classroom in East Harlem where he taught for 10 years.