Youth voice matters more when other youth are listening. – WadadUSA.org

News reporting is essential to civic life, but it’s not civic life all by itself. Audiences matter. That’s why WadadUSA‘s Formative Journalism™ approach understands young audiences as engaged subjects, not idle or passive consumers. “Making the story,” sharing, or even just “lurking,” each level of participation powers the cycle of civic engagement, as research and teens’ daily experience show.

Founding Partners

A project of WACE Public Works Inc., a nonprofit corporation registered in the state of Delaware [501C(3) status pending], WadadUSA will advance its mission through partnerships in journalism, education, digital media production and distribution, and civic-engagement enterprise. Founding partners include:

WSIU Public Broadcasting, licensed to the Board of Trustees of Southern Illinois University. WSIU’s services include 5 digital public tv channels and 3 public radio stations that form an interconnected network reaching 5 million households in 67 of 102 counties in Illinois, plus parts of Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Missouri, and Tennessee. As a member of the public media system, WSIU also connects to more than 400 local PBS and NPR public media members and affiliated groups throughout the country with free broadcasts reaching nearly every American.

The Center for Intentional Media, founded by Russell Miller, Ph.D., of the City University of New York, to advance excellence in media through research, outreach to the production community, innovations in digital distribution, and the development of media-centric curricula and activities for all ages. The Center has developed turnkey educational programs for clients including Nickelodeon, Disney, Sesame Workshop, the Metropolitan Opera, and the American Museum of Natural History.

Project Summary

WadadUSA‘s network for production and digital distribution of news and nonfiction media will comprise regional, state, and local youth-led news bureaus coordinated through a central newsroom at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, IL (SIU), with the support of WSIU Public Broadcasting. SIU students and faculty in journalism and the social sciences will co-create curricula and training models designed for modular extension to communities across the United States, in collaboration with the Center for Intentional Media.