Where We Live wins national award

Where We Live, WNPR's daily news/talk show was honored with a national award by Public Radio News Directors Inc. (PRNDI) at the organization's annual conference in Washington DC. The PRNDI awards are the only national awards for public radio journalists - and one of the few national awards to feature categories for talk shows.

The first place award was given for a show produced in 2007 about the issue of gender identity. The program brought together a performance artist, who told stories about his misguided attempt to "cure" himself of his homosexuality, and a transgendered woman, who told stories of her lifelong desire to change herself from a man into a woman. The program was edgy and insightful, and presented to our audience the voices of people we often don't hear - both of them dealing with the issue of personal change and acceptance.

It also centered on pending legislation at the state capitol, providing stronger civil rights for gay and lesbian citizens, but excluding those in the transgendered community. The discussion prompted powerful listener calls....including one from a state lawmaker, who learned of this legal loophole by listening to our show.

This program, as with all of the episodes of Where We Live, was the result of the collaboration of supremely talented and curious journalists.

Congratulations to the team that works so hard each day on Where We Live - it's founding producers George Goodrich and Diane Orson, producer Melissa Blanksteen, senior producer Catie Talarski, all of our amazing interns, and the rest of the news staff which supports their efforts, and contributes to this success. Special thanks to Chion Wolf, who sold this difficult show idea to me (it wasn't easy) and made us all believe it could work. Finally, thank you to Kim Grehn for allowing us to tell these stories.

These people all prove - and the award validates - that a commitment to open minded, thoughtful journalism is our organization's greatest currency.
jd

NPR Election Map

The election map that's on our page from NPR is pretty cool...but we don't have as much stuff up there as I'd like. We haven't been doing very much reporting on the Presidential race in CT (there's not much going on) but I want to make sure we get up our WWL interviews with all the Congressional candidates...and the stuff about voter registration drives. I'm sending Michael Olson an email right now with a bunch of recent stuff. Pretty soon, he says, the map will reflect more on the House races.

Right now, he's talking about how much traffic got driven to KGOU in Oklahoma through the map when they featured a live stream of a Mike Bloomberg event.

Live from PRNDI conference in DC

Okay, so I haven't touched the blog since the middle of the Spring semester, but I decided to use it to report back on the PRNDI conference in Washington. I know that I will have at least one person watching it, Where We Live Producer Catie Talarski. I'm here in part because we're expected to pick up an award for "Best Call-in" talk show...the first national award for Where We Live.

Right now, Ken Rudin and Ron Elving from NPR are talking about the 2008 election. If anything interesting happens, I'll let you know...