This fall THE EQUITY will be launching a new initiative we’re pretty excited about. It’s called Youth Voices of the Pontiac. The goal is to make sure youth across this community are in charge of representing the reality of what it’s like to be a teenager in the Pontiac, at this moment.
We’ll be working with students at Pontiac high schools to help them tell the stories shaping their everyday lives, and share these stories with the wider community by way of our newspaper and online platforms.
Whether it’s reporting on school sports and student events, on how AI is being used in the classroom (for better or for worse), or on what it’s like to try and find work in the region, this program will empower local youth to identify stories that matter to them, and tell them in their own voices. And the medium makes no difference to us – whether it’s a written article, a podcast, a livestreamed broadcast of a sports game, or a TikTok video, what’s important is that the story is told.
Over the next few weeks, we will begin working in schools to develop these stories, but how and when they are ready to be published will depend entirely on the students stepping up for this challenge. So stay tuned.
This project is also self-interested. There’s a lot of talk these days about the decline of local news. You may be tired of hearing about it in this paper, but we hope you can understand it’s top of mind for all of us employed in this industry. In the last 20 or so years, 521 local news outlets have closed in 347 communities across the country.
The Pontiac has so far been spared of this fate, but the threat is always there, and we need to make sure we’re doing everything we can to keep this local news outlet going. One of the big challenges we’re up against is the shifting media landscape. Many people go to social media to learn about what’s happening in their community before they go to an independent local news source that has put in the work to verify what is true. And with this challenge comes a second – the loss of most advertising to the online world.
But equally challenging to local news outlets, particularly in rural areas, is finding people from this community who want to do this work. And it is important that it is people who know the Pontiac or, ideally, are from the Pontiac, doing this work.
To Chris Judd’s point (see this week’s column), it’s the difference between a dairy industry newsletter using AI to write a story about how supply management is causing Pontiac farmers to quit, and a locally reported story about what dairy farmers actually think about supply management today.
Just like it matters that we have journalists in rural communities, reporting on lived realities away from urban centres where most decisions are made about how to run the country, it matters that there are journalists in high schools, reporting on the impacts of decisions and policies that determine them, and learning that their voice matters in shaping the world into which they are stepping.
Our hope is that by working with schools to support Pontiac youth in telling their own stories, more of them will consider a career in this field once they graduate.
Sophie Kuijper Dickson
