America Amplified is a nationwide initiative aimed at supporting and deepening community engagement journalism in public media.

Originally launched in 2019 with a grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the mission was to help stations put people, not preconceived ideas, at the center of their reporting in the lead up to the 2020 presidential election. The collaboration also helped shape public media coverage of the pandemic to include perspectives from communities across the country. 

With continued funding from CPB, America Amplified extended its work into 2021 and 2022. During this time period, the goals for the project include helping stations meaningfully address local information needs through active listening and engagement, especially in communities that have been traditionally underserved. Reaching those audiences can help build trust and inclusivity.

By bolstering local efforts in those areas, America Amplified’s work aligns closely with PBS’s core editorial principles. The Editorial Standards explain that inclusive content “should reflect the views of people from different backgrounds, such as geographic areas, ethnicities, genders, age groups, religious beliefs, political viewpoints, and income levels.”

In its efforts to build engagement and trust in public media, America Amplified encourages stations to lean into transparency and ensure that audiences can hold the stations accountable for meeting their information needs. A key strategy for engagement is providing that information on accessible platforms that are widely used by the communities they want to reach.

As PBS’s standards note, “Transparency is the principle that content should be produced in a way that allows the audience to evaluate the credibility of the work and determine for themselves whether it is trustworthy.”

America Amplified Stations at Work

Currently hosted at WFYI in Indianapolis, America Amplified works with a variety of small and medium-sized public media stations across the country.

Maine Public is one of the stations in the “emerging audiences” cohort, a group of stations seeking to engage with BIPOC and immigrant communities. They launched a project a few years ago called Maine Public News Connect in which they broadcast short news segments on YouTube to reach immigrant communities in Somali, French, Portuguese, and Spanish. Through their work with America Amplified, they’ve added an Arabic broadcast and have started to distribute news in various languages through a WhatsApp newsletter. They’ve built relationships of trust within these immigrant communities and have produced a series of stories about “New Mainers” that came about because of this ongoing engagement work. Through listening sessions held in the fall of 2022, Maine Public connected with immigrant youth and were able to report on their specific concerns and hopes in the lead up to the latest election.

Based in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, public media station WITF became part of America Amplified with the aim of launching a texting club for each of their reporters’ beats. As a result, their reporters have gained hundreds of texting club subscribers across several accounts, and have found new sources and new stories through these subscribers. In addition, WITF organized a sustained focus group for their engagement-based collaborative “Climate Solutions.” The collaboration brings together English and Spanish-speaking news organizations, two educational institutions, and an African-American theater company. Its mission is to help lead central Pennsylvanians toward climate literacy, adaptation, and resilience using engagement, journalism, and education. They hope this sustained focus group will allow WITF to measure over time the effectiveness of solutions-based journalism alongside educational and engagement efforts.

In Texas, the Decibel team at Austin PBS focused on meeting local community information needs. They spent a year listening to and reporting on residents in nearby unincorporated community Del Valle. In early 2022 they published a comprehensive resource guide for the community that included vital information in both English and Spanish for everything from health care to emergency services and food access. Decibel has now moved to another community in the Pflugerville area — they plan to use what they’ve learned over the past year to create another local community resource guide.

Midterm Elections

The 2022 midterm elections offered the perfect opportunity to put community engagement strategies to work as democracy itself seemed to be in the crosshairs of various candidates. Public media has always played a critical role in local and national election coverage.  For these midterms, could we engage with our communities at a new level to empower people with the information they need to participate and vote?

America Amplified brought on nine new stations, bringing the total to 30 stations across 25 states for this expanded engagement initiative. The plan was to gather and answer questions from communities served by public media about how elections actually work. By creating a digital prompt asking what questions people had about how to participate in the midterms, they compiled the data necessary to answer questions on the mechanics of voting, such as where, when, and how to request a mail-in ballot, as well as how to register in each state. To reach beyond current listening audiences, America Amplified translated the question prompt into Spanish for many stations, and encouraged stations to use printed materials such as postcards and posters to get the information out as widely as possible. They provided social media and video assets for many social media platforms, customized for each stations’ use.

Over the course of the summer and fall the project answered more than 600 questions on behalf of stations from Maine to Nevada and produced dozens of FAQs that stations shared online, on the air, and on social media, supplying answers to election-related questions. This project was a pilot initiative with an eye toward supporting more robust public media engagement across the country as we prepare for the 2024 presidential election. 

Sustaining Engagement

Most of the stations that joined America Amplified in 2021 had very little experience with community engagement before joining the collaboration. But, after a year and more of developing texting clubs, WhatsApp newsletters, holding listening sessions and developing community partnerships, they see the benefits of the practice and the deepened relationships with communities they have not been able to serve as well in the past. They are fans!  Many stations indicate that they are re-organizing their newsrooms to incorporate more community engagement and are changing their hiring practices to prioritize engagement producers and reporters.

Contact Standards & Practices at standards@pbs.org.

America Amplified has published a wealth of resources:

• America Amplified resources, including a full Community Engagement Playbook, are readily available online for anyone in public or for-profit media to use.

• America Amplified also publishes a biweekly newsletter that shares community engagement tips as well as guides on topics such as Gun Literacy and addressing information needs for Natural Disasters.  This field of community engaged journalism is growing and changing so quickly, it is critical to have resources like this that compile best practices and case studies for practitioners to learn from.

• Working with an original cohort of 20 stations throughout 2021 and 2022, America Amplfied offered a series of virtual trainings in all aspects of community engagement. Topics included tracking source diversity, reinventing the public media talk show, building trust with conservative audiences, turning engagement into journalism, and others. America Amplified staff worked with each station individually and in cohorts, and coached them in various strategies to reach their audiences and, most importantly, to reach beyond their current audiences to the broader community.