The KQED Youth Media Corps strives to open the doors of communication and collaboration between media professionals and youth. The final result of the project is a broadcast quality media campaign suitable for KQED channel 9 and www.kqed.org. Young people working on the media campaign will provide valuable service to the community and learn to present their perspective through strategic use of media. By adding youth voices into the regular mix of mainstream media, the KQED Youth Media Corps works to provide accurate, relevant and fair representation of issues that affect youth and their communities.
KQED Youth Media Corps is a unique media education initiative that brings together diverse groups of young people to learn about and work with the popular media. This program provides a select group of young people with intensive training in media literacy, community advocacy and media production.
Youth members participate in a media literacy intensive to explore issues of diversity, audience demographics, production decisions and media ownership. They also learn about the role of media in the community and how to use media as a tool for raising community awareness and addressing bias in the media. KQED introduces the young people to career opportunities in video production, journalism, and web design. By working with, and learning from, local media professionals, youth participants establish relationships with the local media, learn how to assess and respond to media that affects their communities and create media messages suitable for a mass audience.
Bringing together local youth and media professionals accomplishes two objectives:
I. Bay Area young people gain access to mainstream media. By networking with media professionals and learning how to create their own messages, the young people become active in Bay Area media education and production.
II. Through exchange of ideas with local young people, news media professionals learn how to better serve diverse communities throughout the Bay Area. Adult participants discover new ways to expand their coverage and be challenged to fairly and accurately report on youth issues and communities that are often sensationalized and stereotyped.
The overarching goal of the KQED Youth Media Corps is to develop a model for sustainable youth-created programming in mainstream media around the Bay Area. Young people who are a part of the program will return to their local schools, organizations and communities as a cadre of youth who have a deep grounding in media literacy concepts, production and journalism. Graduates of the program might serve as a "watch dog" group for coverage of youth issues in the media, provide a contact base for press seeking youth perspectives, work as youth reporters, train peers in media literacy skills, or campaign through the media for their individual causes and communities. As a media-savvy team of young people, they will work to increase the diversity of perspectives in popular media and become an incredible new resource for the Bay Area as educators, media producers and community leaders.
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