Everyone is on a deadline at TV Broadcast Camp. This July, ThreeSixty journalism students scrambled to write scripts, film interviews, and edit the final cut of an article on health equity before the week-long camp ended.

ThreeSixty Journalism has been running TV Broadcast Camp for five years, a non-profit journalism training program for marginalized youth. In 2017, they partnered with his BlueCross BlueShield Center for Prevention on a mission to empower the future of journalism and change the narrative of health reporting in the media.

Gloria Ngwa has been interested in journalism since she was young. As she watched the news, she dreamed of becoming a TV anchor one day, and her interest in her storytelling has only grown.

“When the murder of George Floyd started making headlines, I became passionate about telling underrepresented stories, especially in the black community,” said a high school senior at Washington Tech and Magnet School. said.

At Broadcast Camp, Ngwa worked with videographer Ben Garvin and reporter Lindsey Siebert. Under their guidance, she wrote about OutFront Minnesota, an organization that serves her LGBTQ community through public policy and education.

The whole experience was completely hands-on, with Ngwa learning how to work in front of the camera and how to edit footage and record narration.

“Now that I have completed the TV camp, I can really imagine working for a TV news station in the future,” said Ngwa.

But Ngwa and her colleagues aren’t the only ones benefiting from TV Broadcast Camp. The program has two benefits for her, said Sasha Houston Brown, senior communications and advocacy consultant at BCBS.

“Not only do we provide young people with an immersive journalism experience, they help us change the narrative and move away from the deficit-based narratives that often define communities of color.” she said.

Houston Brown works with TV Broadcast Camp to assign stories about health equity that build positivity and make progress within marginalized communities. Marginalized communities are often featured in the media in articles about crime, addiction and violence, she said.

“The community often holds solutions and has already implemented them, so we want to focus on the community-driven resources that already exist,” said Houston Brown.

The story assignment process has evolved over the last five years. This year, ThreeSixty students report on organizations that go beyond the clinical aspects of health.

“The theme for this summer is holistic health, including mental health, as we have heard from many students that this is a major issue affecting generations and communities. We’re looking at how equality affects mental health, or how dealing with police violence affects community health,” Houston Brown said.

Many of the students at TV Broadcast Camp are part of a community that is misrepresented in mainstream media health coverage. But proximity to community issues is a strength, Houston Brown said.

“We want to help these students understand how much they know from real-life experience. I think it often happens, but in the newsroom, presentation is really important,” she said.

According to the Pew Research Center, 77% of newsroom workers in the United States are white. To change that, we need more opportunities for young people of color to become journalists writing about issues in their communities, said Houston Brown.

“It’s about someone who understands the situation and knows what to ask, and someone who, even well-intentioned, doesn’t understand and can perpetuate really harmful prejudices that only fuel racism. It’s the difference,” she said.

Isabel Saavedra-Weis is an alumnus of Three Sixty Journalism, a program at the University of St. Thomas that provides journalism training to high school students in marginalized communities.