Coastal North Carolina now has nine new citizen journalists thanks to the Shoresides Resilience Media Fellowship.  These new journalists explored Hurricane Florence’s impact on coastal residents.  The result has been a growing body of work across mediums: podcasts, community story-gathering events, documentaries, and even a dance project.  Many of the works will broadcast on UNC-TV this September.  

Participants found that journalism wasn’t easy. Wilmington resident Yolanda House found it was necessary to spend months building relationships with her interview subjects before filming them.  “My challenge was to find Latinos who wanted to share their hurricane story, Latinos who are undocumented and fearful of opening up.”  This citizen journalism project has promoted civic engagement and allowed people to tell their community’s stories. “Narrative Arts believes that good journalism and good democracy go hand in hand,” said Sarah Sloan, project at Narrative Arts.

A complete schedule of the broadcasts dates:

UNC-TV
September 7th at 7:30pm
September 10th at 1:30am

NC Channel
September 7th at 10pm
September 8th at 3am
September 11th at 8:30pm
September 12th at 8:30am & 2pm

Facebook Live Stream with citizen journalists:
September 7th at 7:00pm  – UNC-TV Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/publicmediaNC

About Narrative Arts
Shoresides Resilience Media Fellowship (www.shoresides.org) is a project of the nonprofit arts and education center Narrative Arts.  Since 2011, Narrative Arts has used the power of communities telling their own stories in their own ways to create powerful, robust, and democratic communities.  Learn more at www.narrativearts.org

Support
This project is funded in part with support from the  NC Local News Lab Fund’s Disaster Relief Information and Engagement Grant Program.

Press can contact Narrative Arts at sarah@workingnarratives.org  or 919-636-8668.