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.
VERVE is KUED’s online series exploring creativity. Now in its sixth season, the series explores local people, creative passion, innovations and imagination.
Twin Cities PBS’s “Out North: MNLGBTQ History” was designed to explore the untold histories of Minnesota’s LGBTQ pioneers, legislators, change makers, and resistors. Starting as one idea from one donor, it grew organically into a comprehensive initiative comprising one two-hour film, more than seven shorts, and more than 45 community events. It combined local community partnerships, screenings, intergenerational conversations, and watch parties — all in response to appetite and demand for engagement around these histories.
In collaboration with the Minnesota Housing Partnership, TPT Partnerships produced “Sold Out: Affordable Housing at Risk,” a documentary that examines the shrinking supply of affordable housing in Minnesota through the experiences of displaced tenants and concerned experts. They also produced a number of digital shorts and a discussion guide to aid in meaningful engagement with the project.
In just one week, Radio Camp students learn the basics of audio production and produce an audio story ready to air on 88.5 WFDD. Radio 101 works with high-school students interested in audio storytelling.
WOUB Public Media at Ohio University, Athens, produces a series entitled “Our Town,” an educational documentary film about the history and heritage, events and personalities that comprise communities within our broadcast coverage area. The hour-long program features interviews with local historians, community leaders and authors who help tell the story of the town from its beginning to present day. The station hosts a free premiere screening open to the entire community before it airs on WOUB-TV.
North Country at Work (NC@W) has been collecting photographs and audio content that tell historic and contemporary stories of people at work, town by town, across the vast rural geography of New York State served by North Country Public Radio. NC@W is now returning to the featured towns, setting up photo exhibits, and hosting work-related story slams, which are recorded and added to the NC@W permanent archive.
WPLN News’ Versify bridges the many communities of Middle Tennessee. The podcast team works hand-in-hand with the community to enable personal narrative storytelling and the documentation of local histories through poetry.
Ode is a bimonthly live storytelling event from KWIT-KOJI Siouxland Public Media, of which Stories Without Borders was one installment. For this particular evening, the station teamed up with two other nonprofit organizations: the Mary Treglia Community House, whose mission is to help immigrants living in the community, and the Sioux City Art Center. Six storytellers stood before a live audience to tell their stories of leaving one home for another.
When our long-time classical music retired, we rearranged our schedule and created In the Moment, a daily news and culture magazine program….”[with] a rooted sense of place, and that place is South Dakota. In the Moment features authentic conversations with news makers, scholars, artists, and everyday South Dakotans. We bring you world-class radio storytelling featuring the highest journalistic integrity.”
New England Public Radio and Amherst College’s Copeland Colloquium have collected the personal stories of nearly 30 people from around the world who have made their new home in western New England. Traversing continents and cultures, the project illuminates the many pathways leading to our small corner of the globe, and explores the shared experience among those seeking a new life in a foreign land.
Unheard L.A. is a three-part, live event series where storytellers share tales about life in Southern CA. To gather stories, we used the Public Insight Network, texting through Groundsource, postcards at 70 public libraries, multiple social media platforms, eventually collecting 250 submissions. We placed 25 storytellers in 3 live events, which L.A. Weekly made its ‘pick of the week.’ An attendee called it “The best reflection of L.A. that I have ever seen on stage.” Facebook event posts reached nearly 38,000 people.
Over the past two years KSJD has worked to develop and produce three story-telling initiatives that showcase the importance of first-person story – The Raven Narratives (themed live events with story-tellers from the Four Corners region); Dragon Tales (live events with at-risk youth telling their stories), and Mesa Verde Voices (a podcast series with the voices of archaeologists who study the prehistory of the Southwest and the voices of modern Pueblo peoples who descended from the prehistoric peoples that lived there.)
Radio Milwaukee believes music is a powerful force to bring people together – a belief that drives their mission to utilize music to connect diverse audiences. In 2016, they launched Band Together to act on that belief, creating a unique evening of music and food, with diverse, live music – featuring four local bands from four genres – and a variety of ethnic appetizers from local restaurants. Between bands, the station puts on storytelling performances about race and people coming together.
North Country at Work is a multiplatform project exploring the “history of work” through photographs stored in libraries, historical associations, museums and residents’ homes. We go community by community, to scan photographs and record stories about work. We are building a software platform for archival materials that will be searchable and interactive, encouraging exploration and discovery. We will share the software platform with other stations to use for their own multimedia projects.