Current (https://current.org/project-status/semi-finalist/page/6/)
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.
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.
To Foster Change is PBS SoCal’s initiative to raise awareness around the systemic and personal challenges Los Angeles foster youth face and overcome every day, while providing opportunities for youth to take control of their own stories. The station partners with over 30 social service organizations to support and encourage caregivers, share positive stories, create a space to brainstorm new approaches to supporting youth, and train young adults in media arts.
As part of a digital initiative that coincided with a documentary of the same name produced by Arizona Public Media, reporters asked community members to share stories about how they or their families were impacted by the Vietnam War. Stories were archived online to be watched or read, and some were broadcast by Arizona Public Media stations. Stories were written or taped at live screenings.
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.
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.
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.
Sonoma County’s KRCB radio and TV is working with bilingual radio station KBBF in Santa Rosa to ask residents of one neighborhood how their annexation into the city of Santa Rosa may affect their health. The project includes English and Spanish news features and call-in shows about issues like housing, immigration, infrastructure, and parks, as they relate to community wellbeing, and interviews with residents and stakeholders.
Positively Kansas, from KPTS Channel 8, takes viewers to visit the people, places, and things that make Kansas unique and special. The series covers history, the arts, culture, the performing arts, politics, literature, and more woven together by visits to historical sites. Every story is a way to connect different communities across the state, to understand and find meaning in the lives and work of Kansas residents, and to bring the people of Kansas together.
“Houston after Harvey” is a multi-platform content initiative from Houston Public Media that examines the impact of the Texas Gulf Coast’s most severe storms through personal stories, intimate video interviews, and in-depth news coverage. Content produced for the project included multiple podcasts, video series, and television and radio specials.
KPBS set out to hear and document the stories of diverse people in five communities within San Diego County and the Imperial Valley and find out how factors like ethnicity and income have shaped their identities. “Where I Come From” is the weekly social media video series that highlights these stories.
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.
WFDD hosts community conversations on topics that impact local residents. Using a Hearken-powered web module, listeners voted for mental health to be the focus of one such conversation. WFDD reporters covered relevant stories in the days leading up to the public event, during which listeners had round table discussions with one another. WFDD reporters solicited questions for follow-up coverage and connected interested listeners directly with the stories that came out.
Via a four-year community engagement campaign that began in fall 2017, WTVI PBS Charlotte partnered with local workforce-related organizations to roll out a three-part media project (Dreamers, Doers, Destiny) designed to empower youth to capitalize on their dreams. The target goal is to engage with and help educate 600 local public high school students in career pathways and leadership training, leading to education completion and lasting success in the workforce.
The continuing opioid crisis in Maryland prompted Maryland Public Television to develop an awareness and education initiative in early 2017. “Addiction & Recovery” is a multi-month project in which MPT and its partners sought to honestly portray the dark side of addiction, while also providing hope, encouragement, and information for those impacted by opioid use. The effort culminated in the broadcast of “Breaking Heroin’s Grip: Road to Recovery” in 2017.
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.
In 2013, Louisville Public Media launched The Next Louisville, a reporting initiative with the goal of providing ongoing access to in-depth journalism surrounding an important topic in our community and to invite grassroots participation to find creative solutions to community challenges. We select a new topic for each year-long cycle. Now in our third year we have explored race, ethnicity and culture, and how they intersect with the news and community affairs. Previous topics have included education and health.
For two years WXXI Classical has presented Performance Rochester. During April, the station broadcasts live performances of local groups recorded in local concert halls or at WXXI, highlighting one group performance each day. Many ensembles are involved and the music covers all time periods and a variety of instrumentation and voices. WXXI’s lists all pieces on its website with links to pages with more detail and podcasts of each piece. Social media is used to promote the initiative.
Columbus Neighborhoods is a multi-platform project that originally produced 12 one-hour historical-cultural TV documentaries. It is now a magazine-type weekly primetime 30 min TV series with a robust digital presence. The project has high local recognition and is now partnering with WOSU’s radio news operation on a series about Vietnam vets and another about the wealth disparity in Columbus. The video segments are evolving from pure history to history as context for serious local issues.