Central Massachusetts Year of the Teen

From Publisher’s Weekly:

Cecily Von Ziegesar’s popular YA series Gossip Girl will be taking up residence at The CW network as an hour-long drama. The TV program got the green light when The CW picked up a pilot episode written and produced by Josh Schwartz, whose most recent hit is The O.C., currently airing on Fox. Stephanie Savage, a writer/producer for The O.C., will executive-produce the show along with Schwartz, as well as Bob Levy and Leslie Morgenstein, both of Alloy Entertainment, the originators of the book series. No air date has been announced yet.

I just posted pictures on the CMRLS Flickr page from an event at the Oxford Free Public Library. Cathy Livingstone, the youth services librarian, took her tween advisory group to Barnes and Noble in Millbury to buy books for the library … in a STRETCH HUMMER!!! Check out the pictures, and the huge smiles on the kids’ faces! The day after the tween advisory board went, she took her teen advisory board, also in a stretch Hummer. They had a great time and bought a lot of books to update the YA collection, all while being treated like royalty!

There’s an article in yesterday’s Miami Herald that has good news about teens and their use of MySpace. A study by two university professors concludes that most teenagers are behaving responsibly in the information they post about themselves. From the article:

“more than 90 percent of the 1,475 teenagers in the study, who left their personal networking pages available for outsiders, did not include their full name in their personal profiles, noted the study co-authored by a South Florida professor. And the researchers found that 40 percent of teenagers in the MySpace study sample were keeping their pages completely off-limits to everyone but their friends, as the site allows.”

You can read the full article in the Miami Herald.

“Generation Next: Speak Up and Be Heard” is a documentary that will air on WGBH on Friday, January 12 at 9 pm. The show was filmed on a cross-country trip to gauge the views of 16-to 25-year-olds last summer. It sounds really interesting! To find out more about this show or others in the series, go to  http://www.pbs.org/newshour/generation-next/index.html 

I can’t believe the article I just read in the New York Times about the library in New Jersey that now closes its doors from 2:45-5:00 pm every day as a way to deal with unruly teens. It’s called “Lock the Library! Rowdy Students Are Taking Over”. If you follow the link in the article that takes you to the Maplewood Online message board, you’ll see that the issue is generating a lot of discussion by town residents on solutions other than closing the library. What do you think about their decision?