News 88.9 KNPR series
Project Report by Florence Rogers, General Manager
In 2006, Nevada Public Radio was one of nine partner stations in the LNI/PRPD "Sense of Place" research study, an assessment of public radio's local news coverage by almost 400 public radio listeners around the country. The study concluded that local stations have great opportunity to increase their value to listeners through news programming that tells stories of place. Understanding the unique character of a region and telling those stories is a more useful lens than solely chasing the day's local and regional headlines.
One way focus group participants described their communities during the study was by creating mental maps. Here are few of the almost four dozen maps drawn by KNPR listeners.
A key theme expressed by KNPR listeners about Las Vegas was their sense of isolation, particularly the difficulty of finding and keeping friends in a place with little sense of community. To explore these concepts, KNPR hired independent producer Adam Burke to design Belonging Las Vegas. The stories in the series were highly produced, in-depth and often moving accounts of people searching for identity in Las Vegas: the homeless who live in storm drains under the city, rural residents who struggle with historic preservation without turning their home into theme park, and the artists who create magic on the strip and yearn for a more cultured 'off duty' existence.
Starting in Spring 2008, Belonging Las Vegas aired locally during Morning Edition and served as the focus for in-depth follow-up discussion on State of Nevada, KNPR's daily talk show.
Additional stories were identified that were produced and aired for a national audience on NPR's Day to Day. The result was that KNPR was able to produce stories about our city in a manner that reflects our unique place in the American psyche and creating a more accurate portrayal of our city by our national network reporters and producers. Those stories included:
- How To Boil Down Your Life For A Bailout Panel
- Sucked Into The Tunnels Beneath Las Vegas
- Finding Denise
- Newly Poor in Nevada
- Finding 'Mr. Happiness'
In addition to creating high quality news stories, Belonging Las Vegas also produced a number of ancillary benefits for the station that.
- Allowed us to develop a new underwriting model for signature high quality content and created new ways to convene and connect listeners. Those goals are ultimately connected to long-term support from individuals, corporations and foundations that sustain our work.
- Reshaped the way we integrate all of the news content we produce. As part of his work, the producer created "web extras" with our online content manager. He maximized the value of this project with our public relations company, and participated live on our daily talk program.
- Had a significant impact on the quality of the work we produce. The series worked with all departments to create innovative content that pushed our output to a higher standard. The State of Nevada achieved new standards of collaboration with external producers, and was challenged to execute more complex broadcasts.
- Produced new recognition for KNPR programming. In October 2008 The Las Vegas Electronic Media Awards honored Adam Burke/Belonging Las Vegas as Best Documentary. In those same awards, KNPR's State of Nevada was honored as best locally produced Talk Program.
Participating in the research project and then acting on its recommendations has brought us to a point where we feel a renewed sense of direction for all our activities at Nevada Public Radio, from program making to community relations and fundraising. Everything we learned through the Sense of Place Research has helped us in answering the questions "what should Nevada Public Radio be" for our audience? and "how can we remain meaningful and then sustain that work?" Sense of Place has been immensely valuable over several years and will continue to be so into the future.
Questions?
