As we look back on 2011, youth unemployment in European countries like Greece and Spain  has almost reached 50 percent, according to the Atlantic.

Meanwhile, in the United States, youth unemployment (ages 16 - 25) has decreased since January 2011 from 18.1 percent to 16.8 percent. The Reuters chart above shows European youth unemployment over the past 20 years demarcated by some economic triggers, including the Lehman Brothers collapse.

This event took a toll on the global economy, but since then, unemployment for young people in Greece and Spain has increased close to ten percent every year. Since the collapse in September 2008, youth unemployment in the U.S. has increased3 percent overall.

In Greece, you can start working at the age of 15 and in Spain at the age of 16, the same as in the U.S. These numbers represent those from the minimum working age up to 25.

According to yahoo and the financial times yesterday, Greece is in the middle of a potentially devastating debt crisis. Years of production and consumption on debt and loose fiscal policy have lead to this huge deficit. Rescue packages have been offered to Greece, but the Greek government has denied them. They instead are looking for different options to somehow find a resolution to the crisis. European officials aren’t too worried about Greece’s debt and have not made much effort at creating a bailout plan. Experts are unsure of which plan of action will be more effective at solving the Greek crisis: let Greece default or bail Greece out. Read more...

When Laura Ling and Euna Lee were sentenced to 12 years of hard labor in a North Korean prison camp we asked Josh Wolf- who holds the record in the U.S. for the longest stay in prison for a reporter protecting his source material- about why reporters take risks.

In the wake of the release of Ling and Lee, and the capture of journalist Shane Bauer by Iran,  KQED-FM in San Francisco had writer and editor Andrew Lam on as a guest to talk about the subject. In that conversation Mr. Lam- who works for New American Media- talked about how young freelance journalists are putting themselves into dangerous situations without the same training and resources that reporters who work for the big news organizations have.

We followed up with Mr. Lam today on that topic, and on how the rise of citizen journalism is affecting the quality of information in the media today.