1. Describe your overall goals and approach to address identified community issues, needs, and interests through your station’s vital local services, such as multiplatform long and short-form content, digital and in-person engagement, education services, community information, partnership support, and other activities, and audiences you reached or new audiences you engaged.
The aim of every news story and every news/informational program on WKU Public Radio is to create a more informed, engaged, and connected community. We cover a wide listening that includes southern and western Kentucky, northern Tennessee, and southern Indiana. Our local news efforts focus on stories that have a wide-ranging impact on the individuals living in these areas.
Our journalists work daily to produce original news content for our live morning and afternoon newscasts, and long-form features and interviews that air locally during Morning Edition and All Things Considered and are posted on our website and social media platforms.
Our local content focuses on a variety of issues we know to be of interest to our audience. Some of the major subjects we cover on a regular basis include issues related to local and state government; health; business and employment; arts and culture events; education; and issues impacting the immigrant/refugee communities across our service area.
In addition to posting our local news content at our website, we also host an online community events calendar that allows organizations such as theatre groups, music ensembles, houses of worship, and school systems to post, free of charge, information about events they are hosting in our region. This results in a wonderful, easy-to-use resource where our audience can learn about what’s happening in their community.
We have several opportunities per year aimed at face-to-face engagement with our community. This includes meet-and-greets with our journalists and management staff; monthly live concerts that bring artists from around the region to a historic downtown theater. We also staff a table yearly at the Welcome Back Western Kentucky University event which allows us to introduce the services offered by public radio to college students as they return to campus for the semester.
2. Describe key initiatives and the variety of partners with whom you collaborated, including other public media outlets, community nonprofits, government agencies, educational institutions, the business community, teachers and parents, etc. This will illustrate the many ways you’re connected across the community and engaged with other important organizations in the area.
WKYU is a leading member of multiple public media collaborations that create news and public affairs content for otherwise underserved, primarily rural regions of our country.
We're a part of the Kentucky Public Radio News Network, a collaboration that also includes WKMS in Murray/Paducah, WEKU in Richmond/Hazard/Lexington, and WFPL in Louisville. KPRN stations share broadcast and online content, something that assists stations with newsroom staffing challenges, and avoids needless duplication of resources. This sharing of content ensures that important and timely stories produced by a partner station have a much wider reach and impact.
KPRN stations also pool our resources to fund a statehouse reporter in Frankfort, Kentucky. Ryland Barton creates broadcast and online content for each partners station to use, something of increasing importance as many other media outlets have reduced their statehouse coverage in recent years. Ryland focuses on the most important issues developing in the state legislature, statewide elections, and other major state government topics.
KPRN member stations also air a statewide newscast that covers the back half of the NPR newscasts at the top of the hour from 9am-2pm central time. These newscasts contain the latest content submitted by each KPRN member station, and greatly increase the number of opportunities for listeners to hear local/regional news stories. These newscasts are usually anchored by WFPL, but WKYU has stepped in throughout the fiscal year to produce them when WFPL can't.
WKYU is also a member of the Ohio Valley ReSource (OVR), a CPB-funded Rural Journalism Collaboration that includes stations from Kentucky, West Virginia, and Ohio. The OVR focuses primarily on feature-length broadcast and online storytelling that explores the evolving economic, education, agriculture, health, and substance abuse disorder challenges facing the region.
WKYU partnered with our sister station, WKYU PBS, and the Southern Kentucky Performing Arts Center to offer live and recorded broadcasts of the locally-produced Lost River Sessions, a show spotlighting local musical acts performing in venues across our region.
WKYU partnered with the Bluegrass Hall of Fame and Museum in Owensboro to promote the ROMP music festival in June.
WKYU partnered with WKU's Office of International Programs to produce programming aimed at exploring the relationship between Cuba and the United States. This included sending a member of the WKU Public Radio staff to Cuba along with eight WKU faculty/staff members to gather materials for documentary-style radio stories.
3. What impact did your key initiatives and partnerships have in your community? Describe any known measurable impact, such as increased awareness, learning or understanding about particular issues. Describe indicators of success, such as connecting people to needed resources or strengthening conversational ties across diverse neighborhoods. Did a partner see an increase in requests for related resources? Please include direct feedback from a partner(s) or from a person(s) served.
Our reporting partnerships with stations across Kentucky and our region helped gain exposure for the organizations/businesses/groups from our area that we covered in FY 2018. This brought attention to the significant issues facing our region. We also spotlighted the stories of individuals who are immigrants, refugees, coal miners, educators, military veterans, and the homeless.
4. Please describe any efforts (e.g. programming, production, engagement activities) you have made to investigate and/or meet the needs of minority and other diverse audiences (including, but not limited to, new immigrants, people for whom English is a second language and illiterate adults) during Fiscal Year 2018, and any plans you have made to meet the needs of these audiences during Fiscal Year 2019. If you regularly broadcast in a language other than English, please note the language broadcast.
WKYU focused on challenges facing the Bowling Green-based International Center of Kentucky, a refugee resettlement agency that has greatly contributed to the ethnic, religious, and linguistic diversity of the southern Kentucky region. Our reporters began attending quarterly information sessions as the center, where leaders described their efforts to continue resettling refugees despite the Trump Administration's policy of lowering the number of refugees allowed into the U.S. We aired numerous stories about these challenges, and how it put the International Center's future in jeopardy.
An estimated 5,000 Bosnians and Bosnian-Americans live in the Bowling Green, Ky., region. They were largely resettled through the efforts of the International Center of Kentucky. WKYU aired several stories in FY 18 related to that country, including a conversation about Western Kentucky University's International Year of Bosnia-Herzegovina activities, and an interview with author Kenan Trebecevic, who spoke to us about his book detailing how he survived the 1990s wars and genocide in the former Yugoslavia.
We also produced news reports focusing on programs in our region that assist migrant workers in the agriculture industry; a bilingual training program at a local manufacturer aimed at helping ESL employees; a montage of voices of Henderson, Ky., residents remembering the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on the 50th anniversary of his death; and a profile of a museum in Russellville, Ky., that focuses on the history of lynchings in the southern Kentucky region.
We covered issues important to another group in our region, military veterans, by producing several stories concerning the opening of the Radcliff Veterans Center, which provides long term care and housing for veterans, and a preview of a new project being undertaken by a local library that is collecting the oral history of military veterans in our region, through recording interviews of them about their experiences serving their country.
One way we plan to increase our outreach to diverse groups in FY 2019 is to seek to make better inroads with our region's growing Spanish-speaking population, and better cover the contributions Hispanics make, and the challenges they face.
WKU Public Radio airs a bi-lingual classical music program "Concierto" on Sunday nights (it is also broadcast twice per week by our secondary classical music service). It is a show produced by WDAV in North Carolina and focuses on the Latin American contribution to classical music. We also air the programs "Fiesta" and "Alt-Latino" on our secondary music station.
Please assess the impact that your CPB funding had on your ability to serve your community. What were you able to do with your grant that you wouldn't be able to do if you didn't receive it?
CPB grant support is an absolutely essential component of our overall funding. In addition to the support we receive from our community and university, CPB funding allows us to serve a very wide geographic area, covering parts of three states.
Our CPB grant ensures that we can continue to provide high-quality public radio programming and meaningful community engagement. This station faces considerable challenges when working to raise financial support in our community. Much of of coverage area is rural, not affluent, and does not fit traditional public radio listener demographics.
CPB funding strengthens our efforts and helps us acquire programming that would otherwise be unaffordable and unattainable for us.
Without CPB's support, our public service efforts would be tremendously diminished, and many in our region would be left without a local public radio service. A lack of CPB support would also affect the size and quality of our staff.
Being a fully-qualified CPB station also gives us access to resources and program providers that are essential for our operation.