The people of Pittsburgh love stories about their city, as told by people who live them. That’s a theory behind why our first-person stories resonate so deeply with our readers.

Our readers love reading them.

But how about hearing them, really hearing them, directly from the source?

Podcasts have become a journalistic form so many people have come to love. Audio is conducive to authentic storytelling and powerful narratives. That’s why we’ve been eager to experiment with podcasts. Plus, fans of PublicSource have been asking us for a while now, “When are you guys going to have a podcast?”

So, the day has come. And we are launching “From the Source.” We wish the circumstances of the first season were brighter. But the pandemic is THE story now.

The coronavirus has changed us, no matter what class, race, gender, age we represent, in Pittsburgh and beyond. Each week, “From the Source” will bring you voices and personal stories of people in our area who are coping with changes brought about by the pandemic. If you care about our region’s communities, schools and businesses, this is the podcast for you.

“From the Source” is hosted by Jourdan Hicks and is launching with three episodes: a story about Dana Bannon, the owner of a hair salon in Millvale; Theresa Brown, an author and nurse; and Jordan McNeal, a graduating senior at CAPA.

If you have a story you’d like to share with the podcast crew, please get in touch with us. You can text a voice memo to 412-432-9669 or email it to jourdan@publicsource.org.

You can find “From the Source” on Stitcher, Spotify, Pocketcasts and wherever you get your podcasts.

Thanks for listening.

If you’d like to support PublicSource, please donate here.

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Readers tell us they can't find the information they get from our reporting anywhere else, and we're proud to provide this important service for our community. We work hard to produce accurate, timely, impactful journalism without paywalls that keeps our region informed and moving forward.

However, only about .1% of the people who read our stories contribute to our work financially. Our newsroom depends on the generosity of readers like yourself to make our high-quality local journalism possible, and the costs of the resources it takes to produce it have been rising, so each member means a lot to us.

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Mila Sanina served from 2016-2021 as the executive director of PublicSource, a nonprofit, non-partisan newsroom delivering public-service journalism in the Pittsburgh region at publicsource.org. Under...