YouthCast

1) To begin, could you briefly introduce yourself and talk a little about how you got involved with radio?

My name is Spencer Scott. I’m currently a sophomore at NYU studying Journalism and Middle Eastern & Islamic Studies with a minor in French. I got involved in radio toward the beginning of my sophomore year in high school. It was more or less on a whim. A friend of mine who worked with Blunt Youth Radio Project [at WMPG in Portland, Maine] said that since he and his fellow seniors at Blunt were graduating the program was looking for “fresh meat.” He was a good friend of mine so I figured anything he did was probably pretty cool. I called up Blunt, and I was learning how to use a minidisk recorder and edit ProTools within weeks.

2) You’ve produced stories about a wounded Iraq War veteran, a life-long military man who’s about to see combat for the first time, and an Iraq War widow. How do you find your subjects? What kinds of stories are you drawn to?

Cpl. Chris Kotch I found by calling a local Vet Center and asking that my number be given out along with the request that any young veterans who would be willing to speak with me call. I was introduced to Lavinia Gelineau by my mother, who had cared for her in the Emergency Room where my mother is a physician. These stories came to me in very different ways, but they all were stories of the war in Iraq’s affect on Mainers both young and old. I thought the war’s affect at home was a topic I could feasibly cover as a young journalist, and more importantly cover from a unique perspective.

3) I think it’s taken for granted that war is fought by the young, waged by the old, and reported by the old. As a young radio producer, how do you approach the task of war reporting?

I don’t think my unique perspective as a young person covering the war comes from the way I, personally, approach war reporting. I believe it’s a little more inherent, more subconscious. It’s not really that I approach war reporting in a certain way, it’s that the way those I report on interact with me produce a unique perspective. When I interviewed Cpl. Kotch, a twenty-one year-old that had nearly lost his life in Iraq, I was just seventeen. We related in a way that I don’t think he would have with an older journalist. I think it was more earnest.