WHQR's 2023-2024 RTDNAC 'Outstanding News Operation' application letter and montage

WHQR | By Benjamin Schachtman

Published July 24, 2024 at 12:07 PM EDT

A letter to RTDNAC judges and an 20-minute montage of WHQR's news reporting and analysis from July 1, 2023, to June 30, 2024.

WHQR is a relatively small, community-licensed public media station in Wilmington, North Carolina. Without the support of a university system, we're largely funded by our listeners and underwriters — basically, our community.

With limited funding, we can only support a small newsroom, where everyone wears a lot of hats: our station funds an editor and two reporters, who all also host our radio broadcasts and work with community outreach. We've managed to leverage additional community support, matched with grant funding from Report for America and other donors, to support two more reporters and a summer intern. Financially, this year was a challenge, although that's by no means unique to our station or our region. Still, we hope we're giving our community supporters as much bang for their buck as we can.

Because we essentially work for the public (and because we think it's a good journalistic principle), we’ve continued our efforts to put public conversation at the center of our work, pursue investigative reporting that isn’t getting done by other outlets, and hold local government accountable — as you’ll hear in our 20-minute compilation.

This year we kicked off our Community Agenda program, spearheaded by reporter Kelly Kenoyer, which sent reporters and volunteers out to engage with voters to hear what they were concerned about. The data we gathered, in turn, shaped our 2023 local election coverage, interview questions, and candidate forum format. We’ve already launched a broader version of the program this year for the 2024 elections.

We’ve also continued our Cape Fear Conversations series, which we started last year, has recently been shaped around the four pillars of the New Hanover Community Endowment — a $1-billion endowment that has struggled to connect with the public. We’ve been doing our part to facilitate open, earnest conversation about what the community needs and how the Endowment can make transformational change — with free public forums that we’ve edited and broadcast as episodes of our show The Newsroom.

We’ve continued to work collaboratively, as well, with joint reporting done with our local partners WECT and Port City Daily. We’ve also strengthened our partnership with The Assembly, a statewide magazine, with a weekly co-published newsletter and radio segment, joint reporting, and a new program — finalized at the end of this fiscal year — that will see The Assembly and Report for America fund a new criminal justice reporter, Aaleah McConnell, who started in July.

We’ve also worked to expand our coverage into news deserts around the Wilmington area, primarily through the reporting of RFA reporter Nikolai Mather. After starting in July, he helped break and follow the story of public housing residents evicted due to mold infestation in Holly Ridge, a small town north of Wilmington. And we’ve kept the pressure on Cape Fear Community College, where reporter Rachel Keith has covered one story after another about lack of transparency and accountability from faculty and staff who feel they’ve been intimidated and retaliated against — all while the compensation for the college president has soared above almost all comparable positions around the state. Rachel's has also provided indispensable coverage of our local school district, as it navigates, unsteadily, through culture wars and budget crises.

We’ve also kept up our efforts to support the reporter pipeline, once again bringing on a talented young journalist — this summer, we're lucky to have UNC-Chapel Hill student and Daily Tarheel editor Walker Livingston — who is already doing some great reporting. And we’ve officially launched a new donor-driven initiative, The Fourth Estate Fund, which includes significant funding for our Podlab program, essentially an ‘intro-to-journalism’ course we provide to local high schools, as well as new voices in journalism and longer-form freelancing for young journalists who might not get the opportunity elsewhere.

This 20-minute audio compilation highlights the work of WHQR News — which is Rachel Keith, Kelly Kenoyer, and Camille Mojica, who all serve double duty as reporters and All Things Considered hosts, RFA reporter Nikolai Mather, our The Assembly colleague Johanna F. Still, and News Director Ben Schachtman, who also reports and hosts.

It’s been a tough year for non-profit media — nationwide fundraising trends cooled off, inflation hit the budgets of smaller outlets hard, and there have been renewed assaults on the press, especially public media, with allegations of bias. It’s enough to make any reporter or editor take a beat — and we certainly did some soul-searching at WHQR — but in the end, we like to think what defined this year wasn’t the challenges, but the mission: focusing on good journalism that serves the community, collaborating with good journalists wherever we can, and ignoring distractions in favor of substance, as best we can.

We’re prouder than ever of the work our team has produced — and, as always, the communities that have supported it.

Thank you for your consideration,

Ben Schachtman, News Director, WHQR