ASNE’s Youth Journalism Initiative will host Twitter chats using #ASNEchat to promote the discussion of issues important to high school journalists. Members of the initiative’s Student Advisory Board will brainstorm and vote on the chat topics in their closed Facebook group, but anyone is welcome to participate in the chats. The first chat is planned at 8 p.m. EDT Oct. 16; the topic will be announced Oct. 13.

Chats will focus on a general topic of interest and will be organized so that multiple conversations can take place at the same time.  A Q1, A1 structure will be used. The moderator will start the discussion with a question labeled “Q1.” Participants who want to respond to that question will label their responses “A1.” Anyone can pose questions to the group. The questions just need to be labeled consecutively to prevent confusion. If a discussion seems to be focusing too much on newspaper and not enough on yearbook or broadcast, for example, a participant might want to ask a question to change the topic.

Participants can use a Twitter client like Tweetdeck to see all posts that use #ASNEchat or participate directly on Twitter by searching for the hashtag. Tweets should contain the hashtag so that others will be able to see related messages. Tweets should not be retweeted until the chat ends. Participants who wish to retweet messages during the chat should remove the #ASNEchat hashtag so that there aren’t duplicates of tweets in the feed.

Students interested in joining the Advisory Board can get more information and apply at SchoolJournalism.org.