Pop and Politics is committed to training next-generation journalists to produce multi-media content about the issues of the day and to use new media to distribute news in the public interest. P+P trains new-media journalists through courses, workshops and mentoring at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School of Communication and also through its Pop and Politics internship and editing programs.

Guided by a commitment to authenticity and transparency in reporting and to a larger ethic of public interest and inclusivity, P+P’s approach to journalism and journalism training aims to keep pace with the rapidly evolving digital-media landscape, where industry consolidation and genre convergence are rivaled by the rise of the audience-participant and the distributive power of social networking.

Younger audiences have been famously abandoning traditional news because it has failed to effectively evolve. Contemporary information culture has made traditional “objective” reporting appear a veil thrown over institutional and editorial and authorial biases. P+P students are taught to try to write honestly as much as objectively, to be authentic and real with their readers and viewers. Likewise, traditional categories of information have been rendered less relevant, even distracting. A political campaign is a media production. A movie is a political event. P+P takes a culturally sophisticated view of information products— looking for the politics in art and the art in politics. Pop culture is perhaps the only area of the sixties counter cultural revolution to have survived and grown wider and deeper. Pop culture is not only entertainment but a vital link to engaging youth in cultural and political debates.

Pop and Politics impacts the field of journalism by giving young diverse voices a platform to fight for their space in a changing media landscape. We support their activism for equality and social justice. P+P is helping to forge a diverse cadre of journalists who will not only weather the economic storm buffeting news, but actually leap ahead of their competitors in the job market due to their new-media skills and experience. We seek to build a journalistic culture that is more inclusive of America’s diversity – and of the world’s.

P+P staff members and interns work with professional editors and journalists and learn through experience how to tell multi-media stories, how to approach the blogging form, how to use the wider web in their reporting. The staff cooperate on producing feature packages of stories that included text, audio and video components for a national and international audience. The staff produces webcasts and podcasts and videoblogs. Their coverage is fully integrated and treats presidential candidates and mayors and bankers and graffiti writers and performance artists and indie filmmakers in one breath. There is no established form. No favored sources. No publisher pressures. The staff produces innovative reporting and cultural criticism— news made for twenty-somethings by twenty-somethings, reported in the language and with the cultural references that young people use to speak to one another.