This is not your father's Sunday morning public affairs show. This week, teenage journalists are doing "kid-on-the-street" interviews about sex. "Do you know anyone who has tried abstinence?" "Have you tried it?" "What do you mean it didn't work?"

The Bay Area show, "Youth Radio on WILD 94.9," is produced, reported, and hosted entirely by teenagers, and, like teenagers themselves, it often gets right to the point. Youth Radio -- part community youth group, part news service -- was founded in 1992 by veteran broadcast journalist Ellin O'Leary to involve and train low-income young people in the media. In May, shortly before the WILD show's first live broadcast, the students were polishing up their technical skills, critiquing each other: How do you leave just enough sirens and honking horns in the background so your interview sounds authentic, yet is still intelligible? How do you enunciate with a newly pierced tongue?

Funded largely by foundation grants, Youth Radio runs a twelve-week training program in which teenagers learn to report, write, and produce. Their radio segments are aired Friday nights on Pacifica's KPFB-FM (89.3) as well as Sundays on San Francisco's KYLD (WILD FM). And soon a Washington bureau: this summer, the D.C.-based Latin American Youth Center is launching a program called Youth Radio East, which will be an affiliate of the Berkeley organization.

Youth Radio students in Berkeley range in age from thirteen to twenty-three. Most are African-American, though the group is remarkably diverse. Many are drawn to the program by the idea of broadcasting music, but some get hooked on news -- and stay with it. Deverol Ross, now twenty-four, joined Youth Radio when he was in high school. "My dream was to be a d.j. in a major market," he remembers with some amusement. "Everyone wants to be a d.j." Ross grew more interested in news and production, and now works in the Bay Area as a free-lance radio engineer, writer, and reporter.

More and more organizations are helping teenagers move into radio journalism -- from San Francisco's YO! to Portland, Maine's Blunt/Youth Radio Project to Phat Lip! Youth Radio, of Little Rock, Arkansas.

Chicago's Radio Arte,which broadcasts more than eighteen hours a day of news, talk, and music programming by Latino teenagers, is a bilingual community radio station (WRTE 90.5 FM) owned by the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum. Its signal is so weak (thirty watts) that driving around its surrounding Pilsen/Little Village neighborhood you're lucky to hear it clearly. But, reports Jessica Valdivia, 17, "People call up saying 'We love you Radio Arte!' We've got people leaning out of their cars, twisting their antennae every which way to get us."

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