WHQR's 2024-2025 RTDNAC 'Outstanding News Operation' application letter and montage

WHQR | By Benjamin Schachtman

Published August 21, 2025 at 4:07 PM EDT

A letter to RTDNAC judges and a 19-minute montage of WHQR's news reporting and analysis from July 1, 2023, to June 30, 2024.

WHQR is a small but (hopefully) growing community-licensed public media station in Wilmington, North Carolina. Last year we celebrated our 40th anniversary, but it’s really only been in the last four or five years that we’ve begun to invest seriously in local news. We’ve expanded our focus from spot reporting and a community affairs show to a newsroom that spends a lot more of its time on investigative journalism, explainers, and community engagement.

Our community has been very supportive in this, including some donors who have dedicated specific funds to local journalism. But, not surprisingly, funding in general remains an ongoing challenge. We recently ran an emergency pledge drive, which successfully raised enough money to compensate for the loss of Corporation for Public Broadcasting funds, which was a short-term relief. However, the long-term financial picture remains uncertain. We hope that our pivot to, and continuing investment in, local reporting will allow us to not just survive but grow.

Right now, our station funds an editor (e.g. me), and three reporters, Kelly Kenoyer, Rachel Keith, and Nikolai Mather. Notably, Nikolai is in the third year of a Report for America program (which funds 50%, 30%, and then 10% of a reporter’s salary). Taking over the lion’s share of funding for the RFA reporter was an encouraging step towards permanently growing our newsroom.

We also have our newest reporter, Aaleah McConnell, who is funded by a joint partnership between RFA, The Assembly, and other community organizations around North Carolina. Aaleah, who covers the criminal justice system and other community issues, is currently moving into the second half of a two-year program. Most of our new staff also spend at least part of their week hosting NPR’s magazine shows — All Things Considered and Morning Edition — which can prove to be a scheduling challenge, although the more staff we have, the more flexibility we can build in.

Additionally, for the last several years, we have hosted a summer intern, thanks to a recurring dedicated grant from a longtime listener. We’ve been pleased at the high quality of the applicants to our internship — and we’re equally pleased to send those interns out into the journalism world with some new and newly honed skills, and some nice bylines. This year’s intern, Sarah Ellis, hit the ground running and produced some nice work even though she was with us for just two months.

We’ve also started a freelancing program, funded by a program called The Fourth Estate Fund. Started by a generous local supporter, the program has brought other donors on board, and has allowed us to begin experimenting with different approaches to reporting, as well as in-depth longform projects, that we would not have the bandwidth for otherwise. Managing a stable of freelancers has proved challenging — but exciting — and we hope to be able to build out our editing and assignment capacity as the Fourth Estate program continues to grow and develop.

Over the last few years, we’ve been putting additional resources into community engagement, including a series of public events with panels of experts as well as candidate forums, the latter being a joint project with WECT and Port City Daily. This year, we continued our now-traditional candidates forum, but also switched things up with a series of smaller, more focused public engagement events (including one we’re planning later this month).

We’ve embraced several other community engagement projects too, including our ‘Ask A Journalist’ series (basically, you ask, we find out!), radio commentaries and letters to the editor, and a new newsletter, Sunday Edition, we launched late last summer that takes a more personable approach to news, directly addressing our readers with updates, analysis, and behind-the-scenes insights into the news.

While our reporters do wear many hats, and cover a wide range of issues, we work to make sure they have the bandwidth to really dig in on their areas of expertise: for Rachel, that’s local education, for Kelly, that’s been housing, homelessness, and transportation, for Nikolai, it’s been rural issues as well as trans rights, and Aaleah, that’s been community issues, and for me, it’s continued to be my favorite hobbyhorse: government accountability.

Lastly, as local journalists, we don’t often spend our resources on national stories – but there was no ignoring the local impacts of the radical reshaping (and, in some cases, wholesale dismantling) of federal agencies and programs by the second Trump administration. So in late winter and early spring, we spent some considerable time documenting how those changes impacted everything from our local refugee organizations to educational funding and programs to civil rights issues.

This 20-minute audio compilation highlights the work of WHQR News — and while it doesn’t capture the work we do in print or out in the community, I hope it provides some sense of the scope and scale of our reporting.

This has been the most politically and financially challenging year in recent history — which is truly saying something — but we remain committed to the idea that the answer to those challenges is more, better reporting, not some scaling back or ‘value engineering’ or retreating from the hard work and higher costs of real journalism. So far, our community has had our back on that, and we’re hopeful we can maintain and grow that support.

Thank you for your consideration,

Ben Schachtman, News Director, WHQR