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At the TV broadcast camp, everyone is on deadline. This July, sixty-three journalism students scrambled to write scripts, film interviews and edit the final chapter of their story about health equity before the week-long camp ended.
Three Sixty Journalism, a non-profit journalism training program for marginalized youth, has been running a TV broadcast camp for five years. In the year In 2017, they partnered with the BlueCross BlueShield Prevention Center on a mission to empower the future of journalism and change the narrative of health coverage in the media.
Gloria Ngwa has been interested in journalism since she was young. She watched the news and dreamed of becoming a TV anchor one day. And her passion for storytelling grew.
“When the killing of George Floyd started making headlines, I became more passionate about telling stories that are underrepresented, especially in the black community,” said the Washington Tech and Magnet School high school junior.
At Broadcast Camp, Ngwa worked with videographer Ben Garvin and reporter Lindsay Sievert. By their guidance, She made history. About OutFront Minnesota, an organization serving the LGBQ community through public policy and education.
The entire experience was completely hands-on: Ngwa learned how to work in front of the camera as well as how to edit footage and record voice-overs.
“Now that I’ve finished the TV camp, I can see myself working for a TV news station in the future,” Ngwa said.
But Ngwa and her peers are not the only ones to benefit from the TV broadcast camp. BCBS Senior Communications and Advocacy Advisor Sasha Houston Brown said the program has a dual benefit.
“Not only are we giving young people an immersive journalism experience, but they’re helping us change the narrative and move away from the deficit-based narratives that often characterize communities of color,” she said.
Houston Brown is partnering with TV Broadcast Camp to share stories about health equity that elevate positivity and progress in marginalized communities. So often marginalized communities are represented in media stories about crime, addiction and violence, she says.
“We want to focus on community-led resources that already exist, because communities often hold solutions and are implementing them,” Houston Brown said.
The history classification process has evolved over the past five years. This year, sixty-three students are reporting on organizations beyond the clinical aspects of health.
“This summer, the theme is universal health, which includes mental health, because we heard from so many students that it’s a huge problem in their generation and in their communities. So we’re looking at how gender inequity in schools impacts mental health, or how addressing police violence impacts community health,” Houston Brown said.
Many of the students in the TV broadcast camp are part of communities that have been misrepresented in the mainstream media’s health coverage. But their closeness to their community’s issues is a strength, Houston Brown said.
“We want to help these students realize how much knowledge they have through their life experiences. I think we often downplay the importance of life experience in the media and journalism fields, but representation is so important in the newsroom,” she said.
77% of newsroom workers in the US are white, according to the Pew Research Center. To change that, there needs to be more opportunities for young people of color to become journalists who write about issues in their communities, Houston Brown said.
“It’s the difference between someone who understands the situation and knows what questions to ask, and someone who, even with good intentions, doesn’t understand and has deeply harmful biases that reinforce racism,” she said.
Isabelle Saavedra-Weiss is an alumna of Three Sixty Journalism, a program at the University of St. Thomas that provides journalism training to high school students from marginalized communities.
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