2025 Program Overview

Public Square Amplified (PSA) is a grassroots local nonprofit newsroom headquartered in Newark, New Jersey, founded by a team of Black women with over 80 years of combined experience in the academic, nonprofit, journalism, and community organizing sectors.

PSA positions journalism to deconstruct our shared racialized space and the power of construct and context in curating and consuming news. Our reporting centers on democracy, social and economic justice, racial equality, and the immigrant experience rooted in community.

We are telling the story of New Jerseyans from the perspective of New Jersey, the nation, and the world.

OUR MISSION:

PSA positions journalism as a civic tool and creates a pipeline for a new cadre of local journalists of color representing their geographic and ethnic communities. 

OUR VALUES:

• Our community is us

• Centering Race, community, and justice

• Social justice movements

• Curious mind

• Sense of adventure

• Transparency

• Honesty

• Doggedness

• Keen sense of humor

• Willingness to be wrong

• Open to learning

• Allowance to hear the other

• Working in a team

OVERVIEW

PSA's "Citizen as Journalist" Class of 2025 will take participants through an experiential learning process to inspire storytelling that centers the voice of activists, students, workers, and immigrants.

The class will focus on four modules of learning:

• Civics 

• News Reporting

• Photojournalism

• Opinion Writing

Participants will learn to manipulate journalism tools to explore and document their storytelling and engage in first-person reporting. Participants will be exposed to multimedia production, long-form writing, sourcing, interviewing, photography, and more.

The class opens the storytelling world to community members who are untrained in journalism and news reporting and creates spaces for them to witness events that impact their lives and the transformation of their communities. Those members who are working journalists will be exposed to new ways of centering the peripheral voice and social movements.

TIME COMMITMENT

Classes will take place in PSA's virtual newsroom with periods of hands-on, in-the-community news-story gathering. The introductory class and the final wrap-up class and celebration will be held in person near PSA's headquarters in Newark.

• Class begins the morning of Saturday, June 14, 2025, and runs each Saturday through August 23, 2025. The class will not be held on the weekend of July 4, in commemoration of US Independence Day.

• Class periods are three hours long. 

• Time will be assigned for class preparation, including assigned readings, videos, and community meetings to support the ongoing training and assignments. 

COMPENSATION

Class participants could qualify for a maximum stipend of $3,500.00.

DELIVERABLES

Participants will engage in a collaborative news-gathering process and produce collective content through writing, photography, videography, and audio with rigorous research.

By the conclusion of the class schedule, each participant is expected to produce at minimum: 

1. One (1) news story

2. One (1) photo essay

3. One (1) editorial