08/30/2024
Allow us to reintroduce ourselves...
In the spirit of news sources such as Capital B and National Native News, Equal Access Public Media (EAPM) is seeking to reach an often excluded, forgotten, and underprivileged community spread across the country rather than in one small zip code. EAPM, a year-old project recently fiscally sponsored by Alternative Newsweekly Foundation, seeks to make national news and local news of national interest accessible by making jobs in the journalism industry – from the newsroom to the operations side – accessible.
Roughly a quarter of American adults self-identify as disabled and about a half of Americans have a chronic illness. These disabilities and illnesses can affect how people see, hear, move, communicate, and process information. Likewise, they can often affect people's employment. Unemployment among disabled people – 7.2 percent – is more than double that of nondisabled adults, and disabled people report feeling fear of asking for accommodations at work and facing consequences up to termination when they do. We seek to create more accommodating jobs for people in the news industry with flexible schedules, available accommodations and technology, and work-from-almost-anywhere jobs. For our audiences, we seek to use multimedia presentations of news online and employ WCAG standards; universal design, include audio description tracks on video for our blind and low vision audience; include American Sign Language translations on audio, video, and text for our deaf and hard-of-hearing population – up to 1 million of whom use ASL as their primary language; and employ plain language and Easy Read in new and creative ways.
We are seeking start-up funding and support from partners to launch our first publication: a weekday online publication covering national news and partnering with local nonprofit news media (online, print, audio, and video) around the country to redistribute news in our accessible model. To do this, we need funding to hire our first staff members, including journalists and editors and accessibility experts.
Maybe you're that partner. Maybe you're that donor. Or maybe you have a spare $5. However you can help, we'd love you to be a part of EAPM.
www.equalaccesspublicmedia.org
Welcome to Equal Access Public Media We are buildinga different kindof nonprofit news organization h A digital media organization EAPM is an all-digital multimedia news organization. We’ll publish digitally, and our employees work remotely. Get to know why EAPM includes this and more in what we th...
