Wow! It’s hard to believe that after all of these years and hard work, Millennial Youth is finally here! We’d like to thank everyone who helped to make this project a reality, especially the Times Union newspaper. Without them, this magazine would have been just another dream that ended inside the heads of a few middle school kids.

It all started in 2007 when Greg Stapleton, Education Manager at the Times Union’s Classroom Enrichment Program, set up a tour of the newsroom and the press for a group of kids who loved to write. At the end of a meeting in which editors were choosing stories and photos for the next day’s front page, Mary Fran Gleason, Times Union managing editor at the time, turned and said, “Hey. Why don’t they write for us?”

That day taught us that if you believe in your ideas, others will too. Later, GE gave us 20 computers for our garage that family and friends converted into a writing center. 
Reporters, writers and editors became our writing coaches. Photographers  took kids on assignments with them and  held a fundraiser to buy us our own digital camera.

We got really lucky when 
Jennifer Gish, a Times Union life features writer, called us to volunteer. She joined Lori Cullen week after week and taught us how to write. We loved the classes so much that they always went late. We only stopped so that we wouldn’t miss Grey’s Anatomy.

Writing articles at first took us months. When Jenn returned our drafts, they were so marked up, it seemed as if there was more red on the page than white! But she stuck by us, and we stuck with it, revising and revising our way onto covers of the lifestyle section and once even onto the front page!

Well we’re not little kids anymore.  Some of our original youth reporters are in college. The rest of us are in high school. And there are new writers battling with their own first drafts. Sometimes we ask ourselves, if we knew that we know now, would we still have pursued the dream? The answer is yes.

Millennial Youth allows people of our generation to read and write about topics that are important to us. But even though Millennial Youth is written for a young audience, we still follow the strictest professional journalistic standards. You won’t  find opinion editorials pretending to be journalism here.

Our goal is to publish the best examples of journalism written by youth. We also want to tell stories in all different formats that are appealing to our generation. And even though some people believe that young people won’t read publications on paper, we believe that they are wrong. That’s why we chose to publish Millennial Youth in print.

Last, it is also important to us that all young people who contribute to Millennial Youth get paid for their work, just like an adult journalist would. At this time when it is so difficult for many of us to find a job, this is especially important.

So thank you to everyone who believed in and supported us along the way: Mary Fran Gleason and Jenn Gish for believing in us; all the writers, editors and photographers that have mentored us; Rex Smith for giving us an office in the Times Union education building; Sid Ramotar of Key Bank, who gives us business talks (and donuts!); Albany Print, who printed the promotional products that give us a professional look; Will Waldron, who helped us to set up photo shoots and trusted that we wouldn’t break the lights; Rob Brill, Darrell Kirton and Claudia Ricci for their careful editing; Maria Stoodley and Emily Draus who make our work look so good; Dan Couto and Tom Clemente for helping us find the best place to print and to all of the youth writers, photographers and videographers who contributed to this first issue.

Thank you. We couldn’t have done it without you all!