Melissa Torres learns how to conduct an audio interview during an NEPR Media Lab class.

NEPR Media Lab

New England Public Radio (NEPR) Media Lab is an after-school program and youth initiative (ages 14-18) powered by the art of storytelling. Through journalism and audio production, students learn to tell stories with sound. Participants learn how to interview, write, and produce commentaries and feature stories. Media Lab’s goal is to train young, diverse voices to tell stories that are important to youth and empower them with the knowledge that they have something to say.

KQED’s Youth Takeover of the News

Over the course of one week, stories pitched and reported by high school students across the Bay Area could be heard on nine of KQED’s news programs and podcasts. To collect and curate these stories, KQED staff collaborated with a pilot group of ten local high school journalism classes over two months.

What Listening Looks Like

“What Listening Looks Like” asked people to show us where they listen to our radio services and had them take a selfie and send it to us to be shared on our website. We had an underwriter who would donate $5 for every photo submitted.

Saturday Morning Tunes

Many parents want to do things with their kids, not just for their kids — to explore shared interests like hiking or, in this case, live music. Saturday Morning Tunes is a series of live concerts, mini-festivals, and other events from WTMD which appeal to kids and parents alike. Held in and around Baltimore each month, they’re broadcast live on air and streamed on Facebook Live, and have brought together thousands of adults and children.

Southern Remedy

Southern Remedy is Mississippi Public Broadcasting’s flagship health and wellness initiative. It includes a doctor call-in radio show every weekday, a health and wellness documentary TV/digital program, a Health Minute interstitial that airs during the weekly half-hour news round-up, health issues news and radio reporting, a healthy living guide, and materials to teach adults and children about good health habits.

NEXT with Marcus Atkinson

“NEXT with Marcus Atkinson” on WQLN Radio 91.3FM/Erie began as a series of unscripted, unrehearsed interviews with the “next generation” of local voices, young leaders who are guiding Erie through challenges affecting the city’s minority communities, including an epidemic of gun violence, a scarcity of professional opportunities, a lack of safe and affordable housing and incidences of police brutality. The series has recently expanded to new platforms, reaching thousands of additional audience members, especially those outside of the public media “traditional” audience, and its focus has expanded beyond challenges that are specific to the city, touching on topics that are equally relevant to young residents beyond the city and county limits.

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100 Days in Appalachia

100 Days in Appalachia is a reporting project created the day after the 2016 election that pushes back against parachute journalists’ and national narratives about rural America. It’s published at the West Virginia University Reed College of Media Innovation Center in collaboration with West Virginia Public Broadcasting (WVPB) and The Daily Yonder, of the Center for Rural Strategies, headquartered in Kentucky.

Verve

VERVE is KUED’s online series exploring creativity. Now in its sixth season, the series explores local people, creative passion, innovations and imagination. 

News Briefings & Classical Conversations

Every other month, Nashville Public Radio hosts either a News Briefing or Classical Conversation luncheon event at our station. The News Briefing is a chance for listeners of WPLN 90.3FM (the news station) and local community leaders to visit the station, meet local hosts, hear first about upcoming projects and, most importantly, to ask questions and provide feedback directly to the station.

Human Voter Guide

KPCC’s Human Voter Guide started in 2016 as a series of questions and answers on the radio and online. Its goal was to help Southern California residents navigate elections and voting through personalized research. Using the web-based engagement platform Hearken and the text-messaging engagement service GroundSource, KPCC is now able to track a larger volume of questions and offer election-related reminders via text message.

Dream Land: Little Rock’s West 9th Street Initiative

The Arkansas Educational Television Network (AETN) produced an Emmy-winning documentary on the rise and fall of Little Rock, Arkansas’s successful yet segregated African-American business district (1940-50’s), using a historic building in the district known as the Dreamland Ballroom as a focal point. AETN has built dozens of community partnerships; held educational screenings, panels discussions, and workshops; and conducted riveting community dialogues on diversity and race relations throughout 2018 that will undoubtedly continue.

Minnesota Remembers Vietnam

MINNESOTA REMEMBERS VIETNAM is a statewide initiative aimed at inspiring Minnesotans to remember and share stories, recognize bravery, express their reasons for dissent, and foster understanding around the lasting impact of the events of 50 years ago.

Nathan Blaesing of Iowa City

Voices of Veterans

IowaWatch.org sought out military veterans in August through November 2017 with two simple questions: What should Iowans know about being a veteran, and what could Iowans do to show their support other than simply saying they do it? We answered these questions by 1) going to veterans at places where their service is noted publicly, 2) producing two separate radio reports distributed statewide on a network of 19 stations, 3) producing written stories distributed statewide to Iowa newspapers for republication, 4) hosting a live storytelling event where five selected veterans told about something significant in their lives and 5) recruiting partners to help spread these stories.

MPR News Somali

MPR News Somali is a partnership between the BBC World Service and MPR that provides international, national and regional news in Somali to meet the information needs of the local Minnesota Somali community. The Twin Cities is home to the largest Somali population outside of Somalia.

The Intersection (2018 Finalist)

The Intersection is a series of hyper-local audio documentaries co-produced by David Boyer and KALW that look at the changing Bay Area of California through physical intersections — street corners — where different histories, motivations, policies, and people meet every day. The show pinpoints the different forces and factors at play there and, over the course of a piece or a season, connects the dots between the past, present, and future.

TriPod: New Orleans at 300

To mark the city’s Tricentennial, WWNO New Orleans Public Radio produced TriPod: New Orleans at 300, a radio series and podcast that explores New Orleans’ lost stories and rich history. TriPod seeks out stories that haven’t yet been told, and voices that haven’t been at the table. TriPod is a collaboration with the Historic New Orleans Collection and the University of New Orleans Midlo Center for New Orleans Studies.

Ester Commack

Community in Unity (2018 Winner)

Community in Unity is a solutions journalism project and event series from Alaska Public Media to begin critical and thoughtful dialogue between different people. APM works with community partners to invite people inside homeless shelters, community centers, prisons, and TV studios for recorded conversations about topics that are affecting them. Topics have ranged from race and identity to mental health, immigration, and incarceration.

Out of the Blocks

Out of the Blocks is an immersive listening experience built from a mosaic of voices and soundscapes on the streets of Baltimore. In each episode, producers Aaron Henkin and Wendel Patrick make it their mission to meet and interview everyone on a city block.

Midnight Oil

Midnight Oil is an ambitious and collaborative project from Alaska’s Energy Desk that explores the rich history of how Alaska became an oil state. The project is an eight-episode podcast, a video series and a standing room only storytelling event.

Cooperative Collaboration

Small non-profits and small for-profit businesses have a lot in common. In Central Texas in the summer, none of us has enough business! We chose to take advantage of this fact and began collaborating with several other non-profits and small businesses this spring and summer for survival during a difficult time. We found willing partners for our “Cooperative Collaboration” experiment.