Announcing America Amplified 2.0

Year one of America Amplified in 2020 brought public media collaborations and stations together in a nationwide community listening and engagement initiative. The goal was to strengthen public media’s ability to hear from local communities and share their voices and stories across the system.

The initiative experimented with dozens of engagement tools and strategies and culminated in a comprehensive Community Engagement Playbook that spells out how public media can take steps towards engaging their communities.

Our second year is hosted by WFYI in Indianapolis and will work directly with 20 public media newsrooms eager to meaningfully and authentically engage with their communities. Stations will apply to participate in this initiative and we are prioritizing those operating in underserved or rural parts of the country. Our goal is to begin the process of embedding community engagement into the DNA of public media newsrooms across the country and to build the infrastructure to sustain it.

Each participating station will commit to the following:

• Conduct a baseline source diversity audit and implement source diversity tracking.

• Designate an engagement practitioner to work with America Amplified through the course of the grant, either full-time or part-time.

• Attend a series of trainings on community engagement journalism, hosted by the central America Amplified team.

• Attend trainings on digital content management, marketing, development, and other subjects to build skills that contribute to engagement journalism’s sustainability and accessibility.

• Develop local content that is drawn from community engagement efforts and, if appropriate, contribute to a national story.

• Share lessons learned with the WFYI America Amplified team and other stations in their assigned peer-learning group.

• Make a presentation to all participating stations covering what engagement lessons were learned at the end of the grant period.

WFYI will make subgrants to partner stations to fund their engagement initiatives. The amount of funding each station receives will be dependent on its project and could be used for stipends for reporters and producers, engagement tools, graphic design support and various other expenses.

There is also additional funding available for innovative engagement projects to encourage big, bold, out-of-the-box thinking. This money would only be available to those stations participating in year two of America Amplified and would require an additional application process. Applicants could be individual stations or collaborators.

“We’re excited to recruit station partners to become part of this process of changing the way we engage and communicate with our communities,” said Alisa Barba, a longtime public media editor and the managing director of the initiative. “I really see this as a vanguard of important and critical growth for our industry.”

If you’re interested in becoming part of this journey, fill out a station application here.