We were greeted last Monday on Craig Smith’s blog with compliments on our questions and published stories on the premier of Citizen McCaw. We had received compliments before. A man from Vermont sending a donation to our school because of our coverage of MacWorld. Angelina Jolie telling Harrison and Eliana theirs was the best interview she ever had. Craig Smith praising our extensive coverage of the premier. David and I told the kids they shouldn’t be satisfied with their story. They had collected stories from Uncle Sam, Auntie M, Scarecrow Starshine, Tinman Rod, Lion Lou and a host of citizens of Oz, but they had yet to hear from the Wizard(s). We told them Craig’s Monday blog was like the witch writing their names across the sky of our sparkling city. It was time to knock on the wizard’s door and request an audience. We were that Teen Press. We entitled our e-mail knocking: A Horse of a Different Color: The Santa Barbara Middle School Teen Press Requests an Interview. We identified ourselves as those kids outside the gates roaming red carpets and city streets asking people what they thought of the Santa Barbara News Press. We were hoping we could get an interview with Wizards Wendy McCaw, Arthur Von Wiesenberger, and Travis Armstrong. Whether they had chosen to be heard or not, we didn’t think people were hearing their point of view on a story that so obviously (to us) concerned people in Santa Barbara. After all it was only movies like Star Wars and Harry Potter that fill up the Arlington balcony.
The Teen Press sent the e-mail and awaited a reply, just like Dorothy and her friends did that day at the gates. They were prepared to capture brooms, spar with monkeys, even scale dark castle walls. Whatever it took to get the story.
Within hours, Arthur Von Wiesenberger, co-publisher of the News Press, enthusiastically agreed to an interview. The kids wanted video, but Arthur wanted to do it in print, so that is what we happily accepted. The next afternoon, for three hours, Grif, Logan and Sophia secluded themselves in the newsroom, got out their MacBooks and began their research. They googled and gabbed and filled the white board with possible questions for Arthur. With an occasional: “Hey John, have we heard from Wendy or Travis yet?”, they wrote and rewrote and rewrote again the questions they wanted to ask, the questions they thought the community would want to ask. On a warm spring afternoon when so many classrooms were filled with daydreams of hookie, this Teen Press trio was on fire. They went over the questions one final time, categorized them, and then pressed send.
What follows are all the questions Grif, Logan, and Sophia had for the co-publisher of the Santa Barbara News Press. Not bad for kids who mostly just read funnies and movie timetables they can get from any paper. Not bad for kids who get their local and world news from a computer doorstep. The Teen Press hope is to give as many sides to the Santa Barbara News Press controversy as is possible, in as unbiased a way as is humanly possible. The kids’ questions and Arthur’s answers are completely unedited. Our other hope, perhaps as silly as trying to be fair or trying to get Angelina and Brad to go on a bike ride with us some day, is that maybe kids can mediate a dialog that courtrooms and more elder editorial pages don’t seem to be able to. Our hope is that some of the kids can get our Santa Barbara family to talk.
So here is our interview with Arthur Von Wiesenberger, co-publisher of the Santa Barbara News Press. We hoped for video, but here it is the old-fashioned way. Please feel free to post your comments or questions. We’ll see if we can keep this dialog going.
Carpe Diem,
John Seigel Boettner, for the SBMS Teen Press
PS. “Hey John, have we heard from Wendy or Travis yet?”
