Windy City Times is offering a paid community journalism course for anyone interested in storytelling for marginalized communities.
Our Stories, Our Power is a 5-week course on telling stories that are for us and by us that will be led by Anna DeShawn, coordinator of Windy City Times’ BLACKlines newsletter and founder of E3 Radio, and Jake Wittich, managing editor of Windy City Times.
Applications are open now with a deadline of 5 p.m. Friday, March 14. Anyone interested in participating in the program can apply here.
This program is open to anyone interested in telling local news stories serving their communities. This could be early-career journalists, college students, citizen journalists and people interested in entering the field.
The course will be offered in-person every Saturday from April 12 through May 10 and cover topics ranging from pitching stories to writing, photojournalism, podcasting and more. We will also bring in guest lecturers from across Chicago’s journalism industry and work to set up a field trip to a local newsroom.
The course will culminate in each student having a finished product that can be published by Windy City Times or one of its local news partners. Students will also be compensated with $400 for participating in all five weeks of the course.
“I’m so excited to launch this course with our future journalists and storytellers,” DeShawn said. “It’s going to be an incredible five weeks of learning, growth and real-world experience. Investing in the next generation is a vital part of the work and I’m grateful to be part of their journey.”
The Our Stories, Our Power course is supported by a grant Windy City Times received from Press Forward National, a funder collaborative led by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation that is dedicated to strengthening and sustaining local news.
“We’re so grateful to this support as we build on Windy City Times’ mission of uplifting underrepresented voices in news and equipping communities with the education needed to effectively tell their own stories,” Wittich said.
Anyone with questions about the upcoming course can email wittichjake@gmail.com.