Category Archives: Public Media

This summer, 10 teenagers from around the country joined the Cooney Center for our first-ever Next Gen Public Media Youth Fellowship. The cohort met every other week throughout the summer to build community and prepare for events that the Cooney Center hosted in the Next Gen Public Media initiative. Over the course of the summer, youth fellows were guests in a Peer Learning Community meeting, panelists in a workshop, and discussants in our “Group Chat” webinar series (being released this…

On May 23, 2022, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center hosted a virtual workshop to support public media professionals in cultivating equitable, collaborative partnerships with tweens and teens. Part of the By/ With/ For Youth: Inspiring Next Gen Public Media Audiences initiative, the workshop invited producers, directors, and other individuals who are passionate about engaging youth in public media to engage in thoughtful discussions about the best ways for public media stations to deepen their understanding of tweens and teens, and…

The Joan Ganz Cooney Center is excited to welcome 10 youth fellows from around the country to participate in our initiative, By/With/For Youth: Inspiring Next Gen Public Media Audiences. These teens were selected from an applicant pool of more than 60 talented youth to join a four-month, paid fellowship program to help shape the future of public media. In the 1990s, the disability rights movement brought us the mantra, “Nothing about us, without us.” We believe the same needs to…

What would the internet look like if young people designed it with their needs, interests, and rights in mind? What would be different about our information ecologies, what media and news organizations look like, and how tech platforms operate? Based on the principle that all children need to be heard and taken seriously, media groups, tech companies, researchers, and advocates must think together with young people, about how to prioritize youths’ best interests by enabling their participation in conversations about…

On April 26, 2022, the Cooney Center presented the first in a series of virtual workshops and associated research briefs devoted to promoting tween and teen collaboration with public media. These capacity-building events are an exciting part of our work on the By/ With/ For Youth: Inspiring Next Gen Public Media Audiences initiative. Designed for producers, directors, and others interested in supporting greater youth participation in public media, the workshops are focused on highlighting research-backed best practices for engaging youth…

WHYY has been running youth media programs for 20 years. In that time, we’ve grown our program from serving a dozen kids each year to serving a few thousand. We’ve helped nearly 50 Philadelphia schools launch their own youth media programs through WHYY Media Labs. Over the past four summers, we’ve been building bridges to employment for our students through the Pathways to Media Careers program, which combines job skill training with real-world work experiences where they can use their…

The Joan Ganz Cooney Center is thrilled to announce a new opportunity for media-savvy youth to get involved in shaping the public media landscape! As part of our By/With/For Youth: Inspiring Next Gen Public Media Audiences project, we have recently opened applications to join a new Youth Fellowship program that will run from May 2 to August 31. All high schoolers between the ages of 14 to 18 in the U.S. are invited to apply! And did we mention that…

The Joan Ganz Cooney Center and the Corporation for Public Media are thrilled to announce the recipients of the Next Gen Public Media Accelerator Spark Grants. The 12 stations were selected through a multi-step proposal review process that included a committee of 11 young people who shared their perspectives with the Cooney Center and CPB. We received an exciting range of innovative ideas from the public media community and their partners, and are eager to follow along as they pursue…

Public media is at a critical junction. Rapidly evolving technology ecosystems mean that new platforms, modes of engagement, and forms of content are driving every part of the media sector to innovate. At the same time, tweens and teens who are growing up in this new world are approaching media differently — they aren’t just consuming media, they’re engaging with it creatively, interactively, and socially too. In the current environment, tweens and teens rarely have trustworthy, high-quality options available to…

PBS NewsHour Student Reporting Labs (SRL) launched On Our Minds with Noah+Zion, a limited-run podcast series on teen mental health this spring. Over a series of five episodes, 16-year-old hosts Noah Konevitch of Lebanon, Pennsylvania and Zion Williams of Clinton Township, Michigan, explored various mental health challenges affecting today’s teens, and shared coping mechanisms from mental health experts. The Cooney Center caught up with Noah and Zion this summer to find out what they learned about making a podcast for the…