Community News Production Institute (CNPI)

Short Synopsis

The Community News Production Institute (CNPI) is a People's Production House program that trains members of grassroots organizations to make media about the communities they come from and to get their stories broadcast over the air and on the Internet.

Description/Treatment

Our project is called the Community News Production Institute (CNPI), which houses the only news bureau in NYC made up of news reporters who are community organizers actively involved in grassroots movements and campaigns. Our current members and trainees include street vendors, domestic workers, construction workers, immigrant rights advocates, labor organizers and ethnic newspapers, just to name a few.

CNPI-trained community reporters have had their stories aired on radio stations both locally and nationally, brining new voices to the public dialogue on the social, political and economic issues that are relevant to their communities.

CNPI was launched in 2006. During the last two years, members of our training classes brought over 40 stories to the airwaves on more than 100 radio stations, including here in NYC.

Many of the stories focused on domestic workers' efforts in Albany for the enactment of a state law to bring basic labor protections to the industry, street vendors' campaign to end police harassment of the City's smallest of small business owners, refugees who sought political asylum in the U.S. only to be locked up in an immigration detention facility for years without access to the outside world, and day labors routinely denied fair wages and forced to work under inhuman conditions. 

Our mission in 2009 and beyond is to partner with grassroots advocacy organizations to train their members on how to make radio and video news and documentaries, and how to conduct interviews for pieces that will air on local community radio, and our newly-created Internet radio station. We think such a program could be a tool for community groups to help meet their organizing goals by adding new voices to the public discourse.

And what's best is that the training is totally free. All we ask is that for people who are interested to attend a weekly training class and be willing to report the stories happening in their neighborhoods and workplaces.

Our next 12-week training session starts in February 2009. In the new year we will be placing much emphasis on developing WPPH (our Internet radio station) into a cutting edge new media tool that provides an interactive platform and archival depository for the multimedia products of our CNPI graduates and trainees.