Can you believe that in just a few short months, it will be 2011, and we'll be marking the 30th anniversary of the first cases of HIV in the U.S?

Where were you in 1981, when the stories first appeared in national news about a mysterious disease afflicting the gay community? What do you remember about that first decade? How many friends did you lose to the AIDS epidemic? Did you join ACT UP? Visit the NAMES Project AIDS Quilt? How were you affected by HIV?

The HIV Story Project is a public media initiative that aims to collect and tell the stories of people living with HIV/AIDS. It includes "Generations HIV," a mobile video storytelling booth that's been making its way around the Bay Area since early summer. The booth is currently open "for business" until September 3rd at one of the Out of the Closet Thrift Store located in San Francisco. There, visitors can ask or answer questions about HIV or share their personal memories. Eventually, the booth itself will be accessed through an online portal that enables people around the world to watch or upload their own user-generated content.  read more »

As summer vacations wind down, and school bells begin to ring from coast to coast, it's a good time to look and listen to the burgeoning role of youth in revitalizing public media.

Anyone who wants to launch or sustain a media project that engages young people and amplifies their voices should read Drop That Knowledge, a new book about Youth Radio written by Elisabeth Soep and Vivian Chavez. Lissa Soep is a longtime Youth Radio staff member who has developed the program's training framework and curricula. Vivian Chavez is a alumna of Youth News, a forerunner to Youth Radio.

Youth Media International, as it is currently re-branding, is one of the oldest and most successful youth media programs in the country. It's a public media treasure. As founder Ellin O'Leary writes in the epilogue, "Our mandate is to prepare young people to maintain and reinvent journalism's best principles, so that they can deploy today's new tools and platforms to speak truth to power, to cultivate credible soures, to tell the story no one else is telling, and to create art and report on emerging trends and culture."  read more »

The creative spirit moves me. And sometimes it cracks me up. I just came across three examples at the intersection of rap and news that got me thinking about just how lucky we are to live in a time when the means of media production and distribution are widely accessible and available. So much amazing content is bubbling up beyond the boundaries of mainstream media gatekeepers.

1. The Gregory Brothers, that very funny Brooklyn band that "auto-tunes" the news, has released a rap video which, I think, turns a sad local news story into an anthem of community empowerment. Chances are you saw their Double Rainbow video that went viral. Well, this group's musical remixes of news programs are both satirical and memorable. This latest song is now on the Billboard 100 and according to Mashable, the band is working on a Comedy Central pilot.  read more »

Words matter. They are really all we have as a culture, and a community, to communicate precisely what we mean.

When we write a blog post or a news story or even a tweet, every word is carefully selected and placed...at least it should be.

Yet we all know how easy it is to misconstrue what we read in an email, something we'd probably understand more clearly in a conversation when we can actually hear the sound of someone's voice, their intonation, timbre, emphasis, volume, speed, cues that don't necessarily come across in a written text, without the aid of emoticons and various fonts. 

Words matter. It makes a difference who uses the N-word, as radio host Dr. Laura learned this week. It matters whether a Manhattan muslim community center is called a "ground zero mosque," a term the Associated Press news organization has instructed it reporters to avoid. 

Words are living things. They not only bring stories alive, but words themselves have a life cycle of their own. New ones are born every day. Some words are literally dying. This week, two related (and word-related) stories and sites caught my attention.  read more »

The news is often filled with stories of sadness and crisis, tragedy and disaster. So, I feel compelled to share two good pieces of news.

1. Farai Chideya is hosting a new public radio series. Chideya is former host of NPR's now defunct News & Notes. Since then, she's been a guest host for The Takeaway and The Story and has done stints on HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher, as well as GritTV with Laura Flanders.

Her new multimedia program is called Pop+Politics, also the name of her trend-setting blog. Pop+Politics will be a series of specials in conjunction with the mid-term elections.  read more »

The Center for Innovation in College Media has decided to make Mapping Main Street the focus of its multimedia training at the National College Media convention in Louisville in October.

60 student journalists will spend 4 days immersed in the latest tools of documentary production. They will be divided into 12 teams, and given 12 hours to collect stories on 12 blocks of Louisville's Main Street.

Chris Carroll, Director of Student Media at Vanderbilt University says, "The Mapping Main Street project is an absolutely perfect fit for our collegiate multimedia workshop. As college student media continues to transition from exclusively traditional delivery systems to more digital, mobile and collective methods, one of the models we advisers promote is collaborative efforts that share content among journalist and non-journalist communities. As an active collaborative documentary media project, Mapping Main Street provides us the opportunity to practice what we preach."  read more »

WWKD? What Would Kids Do? That's the question posed in a recent study by ReadWriteWeb and Latitude, which asked young people about their hopes and dreams and ideas for the future. Not the future of the world, but the future of the world wide web.

As any parent knows, kids are way more imaginative than grown-ups. Generally speaking, their brains are more flexible; they don't have impulse control; and they can't accept no for an answer. (Can I have a witness?) What makes children so challenging also makes them supremely innovative. The study found that if kids ruled the wild, wild web, you'd be able to touch your screen and pull out ... a pop-tart. Check out this video released along with the research. 

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NPR just got a rare shout-out on Innovative Interactivity: A digital watering hole for multimedia enthusiasts. It's one of more than 130 blogs I follow on a regular basis, searching online to discover surprises, treasures and awesomeness to share with you.

Actually, it wasn't just NPR that received applause. Radiolab – the hyper-original experimental series from Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich – shared the kudos, along with Will Hoffman and Daniel Mercadante of Everynone, a video production company.

This week's edition of Radiolab called Words is a poetic and fascinating exploration of the human relationship with language. I really can't say more about it...can't find the words...but, you should listen...and also watch this lovely and provocative accompanying video on the same theme:

Is a video worth a thousand words?  read more »

We are delighted to offer this personal essay from Trent Wolbe, one of the finalists in the pilot round of MQ2. It's part of a series of guest blog posts featuring some of the talented innovators among independent public media makers, people who are pushing and testing the limits of traditional broadcasting while creating new ways to tell stories, build community and engage audiences. Last month, the MQ2 blog featured Canadian animatrix Rose Bianchini. In this column, Trent tells the honest truth about his creative process, and shares his discovery that listenership is a form of friendship. ~JD

When I found out I wasn't going to get that delicious MQ2 grant money I applied for, I went to some really dark places in my mind. But soon I realized that it wasn't all over for me.

Although my dream of doing a series of solar-powered WFMU radio shows from exotic locales wasn’t going to shape up as I had hoped via MQ2, I did have a good head start on doing something kind of like it: a blueprint. Actually, a couple of google docs that specified how much money I'd need to fulfill my dream, and a razor-sharp written vision of what I wanted to do with that money.

So I scaled back, re-tooled, and figured out how best to utilize what I already had at my disposal: a lot of time, some cool friends, and a brief bout of good old-fashioned depression. Here is a little bit about how I maximized my ROI on each of those things.  read more »

If you only listen to 13 minutes of public radio this week, let this be the piece:

Strange Fruit: Voices of a Lynching by AIR member Joe Richman and Anayansi Diaz-Cortes from Radio Diaries. The narrator of the segment is historian Jim Madison, author of A Lynching in the Heartland.

This unforgettable story takes place exactly 80 years ago in Marion, Indiana in 1930; it brings the terror of America's racial history painfully alive through first-person accounts of witnesses, including James Cameron, an African American survivor who barely escaped his own lynching at the hands of an angry white mob.

A photograph of that lynching – in which some in the white crowd of perpetrators are actually smiling for the camera – became an iconic image of the era. It is profoundly disturbing that snapshots of lynchings of African Americans were taken and circulated as coveted souvenirs.  read more »