By/With/For Youth: Inspiring Next Gen Public Media Audiences

By/With/For Youth: Inspiring Next Gen Public Media Audiences is an R&D project that will conduct and translate research on youth media practices, including the creation of media by, with, and for tweens and teens, while exploring opportunities for the public media sector to develop innovative and unique strategies to better engage young audiences.

Made possible with generous support from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Next Gen Public Media aims to understand the media habits of tweens and teens and to envision a future of public media that equips young people to participate and thrive in today’s complex world. The project will establish a knowledge base to inform the public media sector about current tween and teen media practices, gaps in how youth are being served, the potential for public media to fill those gaps, and promising practices that public media currently employ for this audience that might be built upon or scaled. These findings will be developed in partnership with public media stakeholders and shared broadly with this community to support the development of strategies to engage youth audiences and communities through future content development, local station projects, and potential partnerships.

To lead this work, we are pleased to welcome new Cooney Center fellows Mary Madden, Monica Bulger, and Rafi Santo. Mary and Monica are media and technology researchers who will examine the many ways young people currently engage with media to better understand what they are doing, what they are learning, and what they’re looking for. Rafi will lead our efforts to work with public media organizations across the country to learn more about their current practices and help collaboratively define a vision for public media’s strategies for tween and teen engagement.