Program Overview

Public Square Amplified (PSA) is a grassroots local nonprofit newsroom founded by a team of Black women with over 40 years of combined experience in the nonprofit, journalism, and community organizing sectors headquartered in Newark, New Jersey.

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 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 tell stories from perspectives and communities that have been historically ignored and marginalized by most media outlets and situate those perspectives in local, national, and global contexts.

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" classes take participants through an experiential learning process that inspires storytelling that centers the voice of activists, students, workers, and immigrants.

The class opens the storytelling world to community members who are trained and 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.

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

Time commitment: Classes will take place in PSA's virtual newsroom with periods of hands-on, in-the-community news-story gathering. 

• Saturdays - Specific dates for 2025 TBD 

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

Compensation: Class participants will be eligible for stipends ranging from $1,000 to $3,000.

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

Application: Will be made available in Spring 2025