Category Archives: Public Media

“We used to love playing Xbox all day. That used to be great. But now that it’s all we really do or have to do, they’re always like, ‘Oh, I’m so bored of Xbox. I just wanna do something else.’” (Boy, Age 17 / Pasco County, Florida) Last year the Joan Ganz Cooney Center launched the By/With/For Youth: Inspiring Next Gen Public Media Audiences initiative. Next Gen Public Media aims to “understand the media habits of tweens and teens and…

After two tough years of pandemic disruption, young people have a lot to say about their experiences, struggles, and hopes for the future. And we as educators and public media creators have a unique opportunity to help students reconnect with their schools and communities–and reenergize our airwaves and digital channels with Gen Z voices.  This is one reason we’re excited about KQED’s seven Youth Media Challenges (YMCs). Valuable learning and powerful mediamaking arise when we give young people space to…

“While new technology is connecting us to each other in different and much faster ways, these changes will necessarily have a knock-on effect to how we interact with one another, how younger generations open up to new cultures and ideas, and how we interpret this cultural Tower of Babel from one era to the next.” –Julian Vigo (Forbes, 2019) Generation Z, born mainly between 1997 and 2010, inhabit a world with 24/7/365 access to on-demand media, social media, mobile devices,…

In the 1960s, Joan Ganz Cooney published The Potential Uses of Television in Preschool Education, a report that would revolutionize television for children. Where others saw a “vast wasteland,” Cooney saw possibility, and from it, educational programming for children, like Sesame Street and Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, was born. Half a century later, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center and Corporation for Public Broadcasting seek to carry forward this vision of programming with the By/With/For Youth: Inspiring Next Gen Public Media Audiences…

On January 26,  2021, the Cooney Center’s Executive Director Michael Preston and Senior Fellows Monica Bulger, Mary Madden, and Rafi Santo presented a session called Tweens and Teens: Public Media’s Missing Audience at the 2021 National Educational Telecommunications Association (NETA) Conference and CPB Public Media Thought Leader Forum. The goal of the session was to share findings from our latest research on tweens and teens and their media habits, as well as ideas and opportunities for public media to serve…

The following post is part of a series springing from the Cooney Center’s joint initiative with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, By/With/For Youth: Inspiring Next Gen Public Media Audiences. This is a project aimed at exploring the role of public media in the lives of young people by taking stock of the current landscape and imagining a future that public media can build alongside teens and tweens. With that in mind, we are inviting public media practitioners who are already experimenting…

Growing up, I was used to being the “only one.” I was the only Black girl in many of my elementary school classrooms, newspaper staff, debate team, and even in college lectures at the University of Virginia. That anxious feeling of being surrounded by faces that were not like my own was a familiar one. As an aspiring journalist, I expect I will often be the “only one” in the workplace. While 38% of newsrooms have made diversity gains in…

For nine months, we have been living in the midst of a pandemic that has thrust us all into a “new normal.” Teachers and students across the country have been thrown into an abrupt experiment in remote learning since the spring. Stark equity issues have come into view, and education leaders are worried about the long-term impact of learning loss, particularly among children from lower-income families. And the stress of isolation from peers and the lack of social interaction has…

“MOLLY OF DENALI celebrates life in a rural community—a unique one, but rural all the same. Having that commitment to rural representation carry over into the educational resources is tremendously gratifying. And, the fact that families from rural communities across the US had a hand in their creation added both value and authenticity.”—Stephanie McFadden, Alaska Public Media More than 9.3 million, or nearly one in five students in the United States, attend a rural school (Why Rural Matters 2018-19: The…

Young people want to be heard. They want adults to hear their stories, consider their ideas, and value them as partners in finding solutions for issues facing their communities. The WNET Group is listening. Started in 2018, Youth Collective is the WNET Group’s Generation Z media and education initiative that provides a space for young people to discuss issues they care about. Through youth media and convenings like an annual youth summit, we aim to amplify youth voice and ground…