👋🏽 Hi everyone,
We received feedback from many members that there is a big event on the calendar this month that overlaps with our 📅 scheduled monthly update. We didn't want anyone to have to choose between the two or miss anything on our end. So this month, 📢 we're sending our update as a written newsletter instead of a live meeting.
That way you can get every highlight from us in a format you can 📑 read on your own time ⌚, revisit whenever you need it, and reference later. You won't miss a thing.
We'd love your feedback 👩🏽💻 once you've had a chance to read it. Thanks, as always, for staying engaged!
— Roger Briggs & Amanda Sanders
Positive Media Association 💜➕🎥🎙️🎮📱📰📺🎸💜
What's Inside...
Positive Media is around us in many forms. We celebrate them all.
The Positive Media Association Is Opening Soon
We're throwing the doors wide open. Soon we'll be inviting everyone on the planet who believes media can be a force for good to join us — so that together, we can make it one. This is the collective we've been building toward, and you'll be among the first to step inside.
Stay tuned to this newsletter for the details.
What Membership Opens Up
When you join the Positive Media Association, you become part of a global collective working to amplify media that informs, inspires, and illuminates. Your membership opens the door to:
A spotlight on your work — seen by fellow creators, distributors, and funders looking for exactly what you make.
A listing in the Association Directory — your place among the makers shaping positive media worldwide, discoverable to collaborators and supporters.
Live webinars with people who've done it — learn directly from experts across every corner of media making and distribution.
First access to the Positive Media Lab — leading-edge insight and research as it's created.
Real collaborators, not just contacts — share resources and join forces to amplify one another's reach.
Media Campfires — open-ended gatherings built for real connection and fresh ideas.
Social Media Workshops — swap the best practices and hard-won tricks that are moving the needle right now.
Stronger together, never alike. Imagine what could happen if we all started working together. We can't wait to welcome you in.
Positive Media is Establishing Itself in Universities
There's something genuinely hopeful about seeing "positive media" show up on a course catalog. It means the conversation is finally maturing past screen-time panic and into something more useful: how do we make media that's actually worth people's time? Every program below represents a university betting that the answer is teachable — that a filmmaker, a journalist, or a product designer can be trained to build things that leave audiences better than they found them. That's a bet worth watching.
Degrees & Certificates
Fielding Graduate University — MA in Applied Media Psychology (+ PhD, certificate) The only place with an actual course called Positive Media Psychology. PSY-777 applies the tenets of positive psychology directly to media, and Pamela Rutledge — who essentially named the field — teaches there. https://www.fielding.edu/school-of-psychology/masters-in-applied-media-psychology/
Columbia College Chicago — MA in Media for Social Impact Three semesters, fully online, community-first. Less theory, more "go build something that moves people." https://www.colum.edu/academics/programs/media-for-social-impact
UPenn (Annenberg + SP2) — Executive Program in Digital Media for Social Impact A master's-level certificate for working professionals — you leave with a real strategy for your own organization, not a thesis. https://www.asc.upenn.edu/research/centers/executive-program-digital-media-social-impact/program
Research Centers
Harvard GSE — Center for Digital Thriving The philosophical heavyweight. Agency over abstinence, critical optimism over doom — a deliberate refusal to villainize technology. https://digitalthriving.gse.harvard.edu/
Cambridge (Leverhulme CFI) — Digital Wellbeing Observatory Newest on the list, announced June 2026. Five years tracking how the public actually uses AI and what it does to wellbeing — via roadshows in rural and industrial communities, not just lab panels. https://www.lcfi.ac.uk/
Boston University — Center for Media Innovation & Social Impact Opened spring 2025 to rebuild trust in science, democracy, and community. Still defining itself, which makes it approachable. https://www.bu.edu/com/
UCLA TFT — Skoll Center for Social Impact Entertainment The first center built solely around entertainment as a change engine. Jeff Skoll money, Hollywood adjacency. https://www.tft.ucla.edu/
UCLA Psychology — Center for Scholars & Storytellers Home of the Teens and Screens report. Its youth program pays 13–18-year-olds to shape the research and the content — teens as collaborators, not subjects. https://www.scholarsandstorytellers.com/
MIT Media Lab — Center for Constructive Communication Building tools that promote shared understanding instead of side-taking, backed by $22M+ toward healthier network design. https://www.ccc.mit.edu/
USC Annenberg — Norman Lear Center Not new, but the receipts. Its research shows nuanced mental health storylines measurably reduce stigma and drive help-seeking. https://learcenter.org/
American University — Center for Media & Social Impact Documentary, public media, and comedy as civic tools. The comedy research is the sleeper asset. https://cmsimpact.org/
CEU + University of Vienna, TU Wien, WU Vienna — Center for Digital Humanism Vienna
Four universities, one hub, founded 1 July 2026 with a ten-year financial plan already locked in — built to keep technological innovation tethered to democratic values and human well-being. The rare center that opened funded rather than fundraising. https://www.ceu.edu/
Constructive Journalism
Aarhus University — Constructive Institute Out to change global news culture toward reporting that connects rather than corrodes. Ten fellows a year; 10th cohort starts August 2026. https://constructiveinstitute.org/
Windesheim University of Applied Sciences (NL) — School of Journalism
The first journalism school anywhere to build constructive journalism into its curriculum, research, and partnerships — it hired the woman who invented the field to run it. The underlying theory draws directly on positive psychology.
https://www.windesheim.com/research EJTADOI ResolverMount Royal University (Canada) — Journalism & Digital Media, BCMM
The oldest undergraduate journalism program in Western Canada, now teaching solutions reporting inside a small-cohort, heavy-coaching model. Its trauma-informed Climate Disaster Project drew a National Newspaper Awards citation.
https://www.mtroyal.ca/ProgramsCourses/FacultiesSchoolsCentres/Communications/
Call for Beta Testers
Bringing together global media organizations around the world and supporting them to do their best work requires an upgraded platform. The Positive Media Association has selected CoGather as the platform its developing to support the needs of its members.
If you are …
comfortable learning new web apps (without documentation)
curiosity-led when exploring new apps
patient when using new software, knowing there are issues to be found and tested
detail-oriented and able to describe steps-to-reproduce for each issue you encounter
willing to report all the issues you encounter and ideas you have for improvements
then we are looking for you! We need 12 people to test the beta version of CoGather, using it to chat with one another, plan project work, and use it like its the established platform for the group. When testing, you will use CoGather to file cases for all issues you encounter and submit ideas for all enhancements you recommend. Email [email protected] to volunteer as a tester.
Save the Date for Updates
Join us for the Positive Media Community Update on Tuesday, September 8 at 9 am Pacific / 12 pm Eastern / 5 pm UK. It's a 60-minute gathering, and we'll hold it on the 2nd Tuesday of every month — same time, every time, so it's easy to make it part of your rhythm. Zoom link — https://dub.sh/communityupdate
Want us to send you a calendar invite and automatically update it if anything changes? Comment “invite me” and we’ll take care of the rest.
New Series On Air Soon
Meet On Air, our new expert seminar series. Live conversations with the makers, thinkers, and builders shaping positive media, and a seat saved for you.
The mic is open
We're starting something new, and we'd love for you to be in the room.
On Air is our expert seminar series, a standing invitation to sit in with the people who are actually building better media. Each session, we hand the mic to a guest worth learning from: a creator, a researcher, a founder, a producer — someone with real craft and a real story about how media can inform, inspire, and illuminate. No script, no polish for its own sake. Just a working conversation you're welcome to pull up a chair to.
This is the Positive Media Association doing what the it does best: gathering what we're each figuring out alone and turning it into something we all get to keep. Everything shared On Air is shared with everyone. Stronger together, never alike.
What to expect
On Air is open to the whole community. Whether you make media, fund it, share it, or simply care where it's headed, there's a place for you here. Bring a question. Bring a friend. We'll see you On Air.
Every On Air session is built to be useful, not just interesting. Expect an honest conversation with an expert guest who knows their craft, room for your questions, and a few ideas you can carry straight into your own work. Come to listen, come to ask, or come to meet the people doing the work alongside you. Every seat is a good one.