Current (https://current.org/project-category/public-affairs-local-issues/page/6/)
The South Florida PBS Virtual LGBTQ Town Halls series consisted of four virtual town halls that were meant to provide an online platform where LGBTQ and straight residents could interact and share experiences in a safe atmosphere.
Lakeshore Public Media hosted a multi-platform series of live conversations with community leaders, political figures and law enforcement to discuss recent events related to the protests surrounding the death of George Floyd in Minnesota.
Reading Frederick Douglass uses new technology to capture a statewide virtual public reading of the famous 1852 speech in which Douglass asked, “What to the slave is your fourth of July?” His words are just as meaningful today as they were nearly 170 years ago.
HEAR ARIZONA podcasts tell stories dedicated to addressing the important issues surrounding our community and empowering listeners to find answers for their own lives.
PBS Utah’s Book Club in a Box provides book club hosts with a kit of curated material designed to facilitate in-depth conversations for their book clubs. The project builds engaged communities beginning with the individuals who participate in their book groups. The project supports exploration and critical thinking on current and topical film/literary works aimed to inspire involvement and a call to action.
Half of Alabama Public Radio’s audience is along the Gulf coast, which is suffering under a “news desert” due to the demise of the Mobile Press Register newspaper. APR instituted a successful program to recruit and train veteran print journalists still in the area to fill that void with radio content, including stories during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Through its partnership with local government, WCTE was able to broadcast live emergency updates from inside Putnam County’s Emergency Operations Center just hours after an EF4 tornado struck Cookeville, destroying entire subdivisions and killing more than 20 people. This capability existed because county officials partnered to provide WCTE with studio space, audio and video equipment and a direct internet link between the Emergency Management Agency building and WCTE’s Master Control.
In response to the COVID-19 crisis, WKAR shifted resources to launch a new show “COVID-19: Answers and Insight,” a weekly series of roundtable discussions with experts to examine the health crisis and provide the public with the much-needed accurate, timely information. The program aired on PBS stations across Michigan, with the first episode airing on March 26 — just two weeks after schools closed in Michigan and WKAR employees were directed to work from home.
KUER’s Interactive Local Government Reporting is a multimedia initiative that makes it easy for our audience to find specific answers to questions about their elected leaders, public policies and laws, with the goal that community members feel empowered to participate in the democratic process and vote.
As Detroit emerged as an early epicenter of the COVID-19 crisis, Detroit Public Television (DPTV) became a key media partner in the COVID313 Coalition, a group of grassroots organizations that united to help Detroiters access critical information about services in the area. By producing a weekly town hall that was streamed on Facebook Live, as well as broadcasting segments on our weekly public affairs show One Detroit, DPTV and the COVID313 coalition filled a void in the emergency response system and connected our audience with life-saving services
Making Buffalo Home is a local multi-platform project from Buffalo Toronto Public Media designed to share the stories of Buffalo’s newest neighbors from around the world and celebrate the rich immigrant history of the city through powerful storytelling. Through digital videos, television programs, radio features, social media and in-person events, viewers and listeners learned more about each other, creating a better understanding of our collective immigration story.
The Faces of Hunger project was a yearlong journalism and community dialogue initiative from Carolina Public Press that focused on issues of hunger and food insecurity in rural North Carolina. Through in-depth multimedia reporting, resource sharing and free community events, and news and community partnerships that highlighted dialogue and potential solutions, Carolina Public Press shined the spotlight on the issues and systems contributing to hunger and food hardship in the state.
The California Reporting Project is a statewide collaboration of 40 local and regional newsrooms working together to cover long-secret internal investigations of police officers which were unsealed in 2019. It is a locally driven, large-scale investigative journalism project that has published more than 100 stories, including several deep-dive investigations, exposed numerous failures in accountability, and led to dismissals of criminal charges in multiple cases.
Bringing together Orlando-area news reporters for a deep-drive into the complicated issues facing Central Florida. We are able to highlight the diverse group of journalists and help the community understand why journalism matters.
KQED’s MindShift newsletter reaches more than 100,000 teachers, principals, learning coaches, librarians and others in the education profession. In the spring of 2019, MindShift began asking newsletter subscribers to submit questions via Google Form to ask other 100,000 subscribers. MindShift editors selected questions every 1-2 weeks, enabling readers to share tips in a tightly moderated way about thorny issues in education.
¿Qué Pasa, Midwest? is a bilingual podcast that tells the stories of Latinx in the Midwest. Funded with support from CPB, the podcast facilitates difficult conversations and explores policy issues, such as immigration and the U.S. Census. WNIN reaches out to educational institutions to host listening parties share these stories with students. ¿Qué Pasa, Midwest? gives voice to the the region’s growing Latino community and fosters greater knowledge, connection and understanding.
Ahead of Illinois’ April 2019 municipal elections WILL worked with three high school classrooms and 80 adult community members to develop local candidate questionnaires that met the specific needs of municipalities in our listening area. IIllinois Public Media (IPM) partnered with community organizations on events that facilitated civil discourse, increased media literacy, democratized editorial decision-making, inspired civic action, and educated young Illinoisans. This “Democracy Series” was designed to demonstrate that public media is uniquely equipped to facilitate dialog about local concerns.
Catalyst Radio is the weekly public affairs radio program of the Grand Rapids, Michigan, Community Media Center. It features interviews with organizations and people working on social change, community support, and media issues. This effort is a partnership between The Rapidian, an online platform for community journalism, and WYCE, an independent community radio station in Grand Rapids.
Maine Public’s Deep Dive is a space for complex, in-depth, high impact reporting. The first edition focused on childcare issues in the state, and utilized the entire 18-member news team to create web, radio and TV stories. Maine Calling, the local talk show, broadcast two editions that opened and closed the series. The station developed a communications plan to inform the audience, politicians and other stakeholders. The capstone moment was a public event at Portland Public Library where reporters discussed their work and took questions from the public.
Living on the Edge is a special, two-part feature series, published by the Highlands Current, focused on people and families living on “survival budgets” in the MidHudson Valley in New York.