Montana Media Lab Expands Youth Voices Program to Empower Rural and Indigenous Storytellers

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The Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation recently granted $50,000 to the University of Montana School of Journalism to expand its work fostering media literacy and audio storytelling in rural and Indigenous communities. The grant will support Montana Media Lab’s Youth Voices programming for young people from communities often overlooked by traditional media.

Montana Media Lab (the Lab) is an audio storytelling center at the University of Montana School of Journalism that started out as a media training center. Over the years, the Lab’s work has evolved to teaching young people how to tell journalistic stories about the things that mattered to them. In Lab workshops, teens produce stories about everything from solar panel installation to highway construction to Indigenous language revitalization. Through the Youth Voices program, young people have realized that their voices are important both within and outside of their communities.

The Lab has offered the Youth Voices training and workshops throughout Montana for the past six years. The workshops have equipped students with practical skills and fostered a deeper understanding of media literacy, empowering high school students to engage with and create media content critically. The workshops start with the idea that teens already have the access, perspective and expertise necessary to be great local journalists. The training is adapted to the unique news ecosystems of each of the Lab’s partner communities. Mentorship from journalists and undergraduate students who share participants’ identities is built into the workshops. These local experts help the Lab find interested teens and introduce the program to the community. Public radio stations and professional podcasts distribute the students’ work across the region.

The Lab’s central goal is to show students that stories happening in their communities are important and that their perspectives as rural and Indigenous youth are valuable. The workshops provide teens with all the skills they need to produce an audio journalism story: find a newsworthy topic, research a story, use reporting equipment, identify sources, conduct interviews, write scripts and edit audio.

“Our greatest challenge is convincing students that their voices are essential to a media landscape from which they’ve been largely excluded. Teens who participate in our workshops often have never seen their communities in news stories, and they don’t know any journalists who share their Indigenous or rural identities,” said Mary Auld, executive director of Montana Media Lab. “All the ingredients for great storytelling and media education exist in every community. We teach students hard journalism skills like interviewing, fact-checking and news writing, and then empower them to make something amazing!”

The Lab’s workshop in Ronan, Montana, in 2023 exemplifies the power of the Youth Voices program. Students decided to produce a story about a highway construction project that would change traffic flow through their town. The teens knew the project would change their community and that misinformation about it was swirling. They tapped into their deep knowledge of their community to report the story. They interviewed the school principal and spoke with a Department of Transportation official to clear up rumors about homes being torn down for the project. They asked a Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes spokesperson about how the tribes had been involved in planning the project. The students crafted a story that the community needed to hear. Along the way, they discovered that their unique perspective was hugely important and that there was a path for them to become journalists. The Montana Media Lab taught them how to hold a microphone and fact-check a claim, but the soul of the story and all that it gave rise to belongs to those young people.

This is the second Youth Development grant the foundation has awarded to the University of Montana School of Journalism, which aligns with the strategy of scaling alternative pathways to economic mobility for young people, specifically those ages 18-24 in Georgia and Montana. With the foundation’s ongoing support, the Youth Voices program will continue to give voice to untold stories and support rural and Indigenous youth as they navigate and take their place in the 24/7 media world.