The contradictory position (i)f youtH worl{ers in the pufilic sphere by Howard Sercombe With frequent mainstream media coverage of youth issues such as home- lessness and unemployment, we are gradually seeing more reference to comments from youth workers and spokespersons for community organi- sations. While these workers are still very much in the background of these stories and their remarks are limited through journalistic convention, the comments that do appear in the news indicate the way youth work posi- tions itself in the public sphere. The research reported here - from the author's point of view as a youth worker himself - reveals that th ese comments also suggest a range of tensions within youth workers' under- standing of their own practice. A NEWSPAPER clippings collec- tion is a valuable resource for examining many aspects of the representation of issues and people in the media. It can also be used to guage how people represent their "message" when talking with the media. Among those who convey these messages in the youth field are the major profes- sional and political groups who volunteer (or are sought out for) opinion on youth and youth issues, as well as those who are significantly closer to the young people themselves - the youth workers and others in community and non-government organisations. It is with this latter group that this paper is concerned. The research discussed here looks at one aspect of an intensive research project dealing with the social construction of youth in the media. The project involved clipping every news story dealing with young people in the general news pages of The West Australian newspaper over a two-year period, from April 1990 to March 1992. This exercise generated a clip- pings file of 2,683 news stories. To catalogue and process this material, a computer database was developed, capable of recording a number of features for each story, including: the issues covered in it; gender and race characteristics of the young people reported in the story; the sources of Youth Studies Australia March 1997 43