This educational pilot project will foster community leadership qualities and communication skills in immigrant high school students and mentor role models for the ELL population – a population whose graduation rates are dropping.
Training in effective social media use, in news literacy, and internships in ethnic publications will provide an opportunity for immigrant high school students to develop, contextualize, and leverage these skills while gaining real work experience writing for their communities.
The project will invite 12 immigrant NYC public high school seniors with proven writing and/or journalism interests and involve 12 ethnic publications. Students will earn academic credit, enhance their transcripts for college and work applications, and acquire insight and skills that will encourage future civic engagement. This new program will provide social media training to students, enabling them to maximize their use of digital information platforms and will help bring this capability to their assigned ethnic community media outlets; news literacy training to broaden understanding of social issues and add exposure to ethnic media to students’ consumption of other media and help students develop tools to sort out reliable information sources while building intellectual capacity and self-confidence; provide a platform where young immigrant would-be journalists can express themselves within their cultural, ethnic, high school and social media communities; provide a platform for students to contribute social media expertise to a media outlet and help it break out of the confines of language and culture to reach new audiences. Students also will learn how to conduct viral news campaigns through social media. Each participant is eligible for a performance-based stipend of up to $750.
The Fellowship will forge an important connection between immigrant students, public high schools and the network of ethnic press that comprises more than 375 publications, including 26 foreign-language dailies, with a reach of 4 million readers in New York City.
Developing the project are:
 Juana Ponce de Leon, a leader in the ethnic and community media sector and a vigorous supporter of connecting this important media sector with public schools and higher institutions of learning. |
 Geanne Rosenberg, Director of the Harnisch Collaborative Future of Journalism Projects at Baruch College and a leader in journalism and news literacy education. |
 Katina Paron, a leader in youth media education and Director of the NYC High School Journalism Collaborative. |
 Jehangir Khattak, from CUNY Graduate School of Journalism’s Community and Ethnic Media Initiative, is a prominent Pakistani journalist in U.S. ethnic press and an active advocate of eroding cultural and language barriers in the media landscape. He will serve as liaison to the ethnic publications for this project. |
