Marcie Young Cancio, an assistant professor of Journalism and Digital Media at Salt Lake Community College, founded Amplify Utah in July 2020. After a career in journalism, her goal was to bolster representative journalism through connecting local news organizations with community college journalism programs, especially due to the diversity of students that attend these institutions. Student written stories are entered into the Amplify Utah repository, where they are then picked up by local newspapers such as The Salt Lake Tribune and the Standard Examiner.
Young wants students to write stories that represent their own experiences, saying “Over the course of the semester, we're teaching foundational journalistic print writing, but then also encouraging students to think about the types of stories that they're seeing and to pitch stories that are reflective of the community around them and what they're not seeing included within local media. And so they pitch stories around representation.”
For the future, Young would like to expand this program, saying “The goal of this has always been to make it replicable in other communities… I would really like to build a hub and spoke model of Amplify stories using Amplify Utah as the model and then being able to go and work with other colleges and newsrooms across the country wanting to build something similar.”