Skip to content
Project 2025
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories
Cash in a gas tak

Gas prices up again? What’s going on?

Redistricting

Athens, GA., bookstore battles bans by stocking shelves

Bookstore
www.avidbookshop.com
Our Staff
By Our StaffAug 15, 2024
Our Staff
The Fulcrum staff.
See More Writings by author

News Ambassadors is working to narrow the partisan divide through a collaborative journalism project to help American communities that hold different political views better understand each other, while giving student reporters a valuable learning experience in the creation of solutions reporting.

A program of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund, News Ambassadors is directed by Shia Levitt, a longtime public radio journalist who has reported for NPR, Marketplace and other outlets. Levitt has also taught radio reporting and audio storytelling at Brooklyn College in New York and at Mills College in Oakland, Calif., as well as for WNYC’s Radio Rookies program and other organizations.

TODAYS FEATURED STUDENT REPORT
Radio station partner WUGA, recently worked with students at the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication and the Solutions Journalism Hub of the South, to cover efforts advancing around the country to remove books from the shelves of libraries and schools, and the state of Georgia is no exception. Chloe Beaver, a Grady College senior majoring in journalism and business administration, covered the community of Athens, GA., as part of Charlotte Varnum’s podcasting class.

In her radio piece, she explores how one Athens bookstore is responding to what critics call book censorship.

Enjoy Beaver’s Audio story report.

Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter


******************************************

HOW NEWS AMBASSADORS WORKS:
News Ambassadors enlists journalism students to help local newsrooms fill gaps in coverage of underreported communities by fostering collaborations between journalism schools and local radio stations to create community-responsive reporting that reflects local concerns and priorities. In the spring, News Ambassadors introduced students to two key reporting strategies:
Solutions journalism: rigorous, evidence-based reporting on how people have responded to existing problems.
Complicating the narratives, a conflict-mediation–informed framework designed to help journalists improve their reporting on polarizing issues.

Student participants report stories informed by one or both of these approaches as well as by local community priorities surfaced during preparatory community engagement work. The best stories are shared with local newsrooms for vetting and potential broadcast.

This collaborative project helps young reporters better understand the perspectives of people outside the bubbles where they live and helps American communities that hold different political views better understand each other. Throughout the process, the project links journalism students to counterparts in politically or demographically dissimilar areas to collaborate on stories exploring solutions to contentious issues.

Latest news

Read More

Young man looking angry at display of his smartphone.

The inflammatory rhetoric, meaningless speculation and lack of fact checking by the media may result in young adults rejecting traditional platforms in favor of their well-being.

urbazon/Getty Images

By focusing on outrage, the media risks alienating younger audiences

Rikleen is executive director of Lawyers Defending American Democracy and the editor of “Her Honor – Stories of Challenge and Triumph from Women Judges.” Beougher is a junior at Amherst College and a co-founder ofStudents Strengthening American Democracy.

As attacks on democracy and the rule of law continually increase, much of the media refuses to address its role in intensifying the peril.

Instead of asking hard questions and insisting on answers, traditional media outlets increasingly trade news and facts for speculative commentary that ignores a story’s contextual significance. At the same time, social media outlets and influencers stoke anger as an alternative to thoughtfulness.

Keep ReadingShow less
Woman looking off into the distance while holding her mobile phone

Seeing a lie or error corrected can make some people more skeptical of the fact-checker.

FG Trade/Getty Inages

Readers trust journalists less when they debunk rather than confirm claims

Stein is an associate professor of marketing at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. Meyersohn is pursuing an Ed.S. in school psychology California State University, Long Beach.

Pointing out that someone else is wrong is a part of life. And journalists need to do this all the time – their job includes helping sort what’s true from what’s not. But what if people just don’t like hearing corrections?

Our new research, published in the journal Communication Research, suggests that’s the case. In two studies, we found that people generally trust journalists when they confirm claims to be true but are more distrusting when journalists correct false claims.

Keep ReadingShow less
FCC seal on a smart phone
Pavlo Gonchar/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

Project 2025: Another look at the Federal Communications Commission

Biffle is a podcast host and contributor at BillTrack50.

This is part of a series offering a nonpartisan counter to Project 2025, a conservative guideline to reforming government and policymaking during the first 180 days of a second Trump administration. The Fulcrum's cross partisan analysis of Project 2025 relies on unbiased critical thinking, reexamines outdated assumptions, and uses reason, scientific evidence, and data in analyzing and critiquing Project 2025.

Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s policy and personnel proposals for a second Trump administration, has four main goals when it comes to the Federal Communications Commission: reining in Big Tech, promoting national security, unleashing economic prosperity, and ensuring FCC accountability and good governance. Today, we’ll focus on the first of those agenda items.

Keep ReadingShow less
Taylor Swift singing and playing the piano

Taylor Swift performs on July 27 in Munich, Germany.

Thomas Niedermueller/TAS24/Getty Images

I researched the dark side of social media − and heard the same themes in ‘The Tortured Poets Department’

Scheinbaum,is an associate professor of marketing as Clemson University.

As an expert in consumer behavior, I recently edited a book about how social media affects mental health.

I’m also a big fan of Taylor Swift.

So when I listened to Swift’s latest album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” I couldn’t help but notice parallels to the research that I’ve been studying for the past decade.

Keep ReadingShow less
person hacking a website
Bill Hinton/Getty Images

The end of privacy?

Frazier is an assistant professor at the Crump College of Law at St. Thomas University and a Tarbell fellow.

Americans have become accustomed to leaving bread crumbs of personal information scattered across the internet. Our scrolls are tracked. Our website histories are logged. Our searches are analyzed. For a long time, the practice of ignoring this data collection seemed sensible. Who would bother to pick up and reconfigure those crumbs?

In the off chance someone did manage to hoover up some important information about you, the costs seemed manageable. Haven’t we all been notified that our password is insecure or our email has been leaked? The sky didn’t fall for most of us, so we persisted with admittedly lazy but defensible internet behavior.

Keep ReadingShow less
© Copyright 2024