Shift speaks: Our young approach to reporting

This summer, Shift has taken us all over.

We’ve eaten “marfalafel” at the Food Shark truck in the middle of the desert in Marfa, Texas and bacon-cheddar-elk sausage at our own Hot Doug’s in Chicago.

We’ve bobbed along to Bollywood hits at a South Asian Carnival and rocked out to Muslim punk in a dingy basement filled with hookah smoke.

We’ve spent days alongside laid-back professionals living in eco-villages; hipsters hanging out in gentrified Brooklyn; and sleek, young entrepreneurs sharing their innovations from the ballroom of a swanky L.A. hotel.

A few months ago, the 13 of us set out to find the stories of urban young adults and to create a place for news that was as straightforward, bold and web-connected as they are.

And now, we’ve got Shift—a site that’s drawn in thousands from Facebook, Twitter and the rest of the Internetz with its casual, personal features and chime-y theme song music video.

With lists, podcasts, blog-style posts and short Web videos, we presented news the way the next generation likes it, the way we like it.

And we couldn’t have done it without you: the fun and fantastic 20-somethings we met through social networks and message boards, on city sidewalks and metro trains, at rallies and concerts.

It’s your stories—tales of the important choices you’re facing as you grow up and get settled in our multicultural, high-tech 21st-century world—that make Shift the site that our ambitious title suggests, a picture of “a diverse generation confronting its future.”

4 Responses to “Shift speaks: Our young approach to reporting”

Explore & Compare: Mormon Missionaries by Northwestern – News21 Innovation Blog Says:
April 15th, 2010 at 2:16 pm
[...] beats within the four areas of coverage (identity, career, community, relationships). Kate Shellnut wrote a post that explained the Northwestern approach to reporting, from a young person’s [...]
Explore & Compare: Glass Ceilings by Northwestern – News21 Innovation Blog Says:
May 27th, 2010 at 6:13 pm
[...] they are,” says Kate Shellnut, one of Josannah Birman’s fellow Northwestern reporters, in a blog post about the group’s experiences reporting for this News21 project. She continues, [...]
jotaki Says:
June 14th, 2010 at 1:43 am
diverse generation confronting its future.
Aaron Walls Says:
January 18th, 2011 at 6:24 am
Great info presented.-Free Prescription Help