As the U.S. government slashes funding for public media, a PBS youth journalism project is awarded an international prize for outstanding achievement.
Students at the 2025 Summer Academy, a weeklong Student Reporting Labs journalism training event in Washington D.C. From left: Diarra Gangazha, a junior at East Kentwood High School in Grand Rapids, Michigan; Jayden Hall, a senior at Innovation Academy in Alpharetta, Georgia; Alia Soliman, a junior at the Bronx High School of Science in New York City; Leah Clapman, SRL Executive Director; and Anurag Papolu, SRL Graphic Designer. (Photo courtesy of PBS News Student Reporting Labs)
On 18 July, U.S. legislators voted to rescind more than one billion dollars in funding previously allotted to the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), a nonprofit network of television and radio stations partly funded by the U.S. government.
The cuts put at risk educational and training programs geared to young people across the country.
That’s why an award from Global Youth & News Media to PBS News Student Reporting Labs is so significant.
Student Reporting Labs (SRL) is a U.S.-based journalism training program for young people and their educators. On 23 July, Global Youth & News Media, a France-based nonprofit dedicated to encouraging and honoring news media engagement with the young, awarded SRL its Prize for Outstanding Achievement in Journalism.
“This award is in recognition of the program’s impactful history and determination to continue its unmatched work to introduce young people throughout the United States to local broadcast journalism,” said Aralynn McMane, executive director of Global Youth & News Media. “In voting to bestow this award, our board was unanimous and adamant about the need to shine a spotlight on Student Reporting Labs to remind the world of what short-sighted politics risks destroying in the wake of defunding public broadcasting.”
The importance of youth journalism
This is only the second time the Global Youth & News Media board has bestowed such an honorary award. The first was in 2018 for joint live coverage of the March For Our Lives anti-gun demonstration by The Guardian US with Eagle Eye News student reporters from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, which had seen the killing of 18 people at the school just three weeks prior.
Founded in 2009 by Leah Clapman, then the managing editor of education at PBS NewsHour, Student Reporting Labs has helped build broadcast and journalism programs in thousands of secondary schools across all 50 states.
The program connects them with over 40 public television stations and local news organizations to bring their story to local audiences. SRL empowers the next generation of storytellers by providing free training fellowships and workshops to students and educators across the country and around the world. In all, more than 125,000 students have participated in the program.
SRL also reaches more than 10,000 educators via a free learning platform StoryMaker. StoryMaker provides teachers with instruction materials and lessons to help students think critically, explore their curiosity about the world and engage in their communities.
The SRL program was established “on the premise that some stories are best told by young people,” Clapman, now full-time executive director of SRL, wrote in a briefing last week. ”This is especially true in this moment of rapid change and disruption. In this challenging time, we’re leaning in to perseverance and service rather than despair.”
Mentoring teens to tell important stories
Clapman wrote that newsrooms can benefit from the important perspectives, experiences and insights that teens have and that these perspectives can help news organizations tell more nuanced and complete stories about issues that affect students.
One such teenager that the Student Reporting Labs trained was award-winning alumna Mary Williams, who joined the program in 2015 and interned at her local PBS station in Ohio.
“Now when I see the news, it’s personal,” she said. “The economy, education system and the Earth’s current state aren’t just my parents’ problems to worry about. They’re mine, too.”
The Global Youth & News Media Prize for journalism this year focused on youth collaborations that help local news media survive. The rest of the laureates were chosen by an international expert jury and will be announced in the coming weeks. News Decoder, which trains and encourages young people to develop global perspectives in storytelling, is a partner in the award and helped judge the entries.
News Decoder Educational News Director Marcy Burstiner said that it is more important than ever to recognize the important work young journalists are doing.
“It seems that in the United States and elsewhere there is a war on journalism and truth telling,” Burstiner said. “I used to tell my students that it was a myth that you needed a thick skin to be a journalist. But these days, you do.”
But every year, News Decoder finds more and more young people stepping up to the challenge, Burstiner said.
“They aren’t afraid to tell the important stories that need to be told,” she said. “But people need to support the organizations like PBS News Student Reporting Labs that help and encourage young people to be truth tellers.”
Andie Korenge is a special adviser to Global Youth & News Media. She is entering her last year at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School the U.S. state of Florida. She is an editor-in-chief of the school’s award-winning Eagle Eye News. Along with co-author Ivy Lam, she won her own Global Youth & News Media Prize in 2023 for a Climate Champion Profiles Challenge story about scientist Andrea Kritcher, who had conducted the first test to show that fusion energy could work.