PBS visits Prairie View campus

 In an initiative geared toward learning about the political views of people under the age of 25, director of the PBS News Hour Imani Cheers visited Prairie View A&M University Thursday, Nov. 1.
 Cheers sat down with students in informal sessions to give resume and career advice.
 “We wanted to find out what young people are thinking,” Cheers said. “We understand that under 60 is not really our demographic at News Hour, but we wanted to see how young people feel about civic engagement in not only the presidential election, but the state and local elections as well.”
 “Listen to Me” is PBS’ civic engagement initiative based upon the 2010 YouTube “It Gets Better” campaign.
 The PBS initiative targets journalism and political science programs at universities around the nation. Since January PBS has reached out to 25 universities including University of Southern California, Syracuse, New York University, Morehouse and Prairie View.
 Prairie View was Cheers last university to visit.
 “It was really important for me to reach out to historically black colleges because I graduated from one myself,” said Cheers. “When doing research we discovered that Prairie View was a great place to see because of the activism and political history of the university dating back more than 150 years.”
 They also wanted to get feedback on what they could do to make News Hour more relevant to people under 60 years old.
 “We understand that young people think of PBS as PBS Kids,” said Cheers. “We generally lose our audience when they become teenagers and then get them back around 60. We want to work on that.”