In addition to the road trips, the station’s website features a portal for listeners to ask questions about the elections or questions that they would like radio reporters to ask candidates and lawmakers.
“It comes very naturally for us because we are on the UALR campus. We have a lot of partnerships with the School of Mass Communication; we have a ton of interns coming through here every semester,” Breen said. “More so than that, because we are a public media station, our model is somewhat unique in the journalism world. Like, we don’t have any corporate sponsors or anything like that; we really don’t have any reason not to base our coverage on what the community thinks because we’re a public service; we’re free for anyone. Again, there’s nothing else driving our coverage other than members of the community and what they want to hear.”
One of the biggest findings of the focus groups has been that the younger crowd is largely unconcerned about the “normal political topics” that are often reported in the media. Many of the young voters don’t care as much about statewide and federal races as they care about their “sense of place” and quality of life in their local communities.
“That is a little bit surprising to hear, but it does reflect what we’ve heard in statistics of why people aren’t engaged in the process,” Breen said.
Breen said it’s been “really heartening” to see that young voters have a deeper interest in local issues and matters and that he finds the media often overgeneralizes when they say the younger generations are not engaged in politics altogether.
The preparation for the project started last year with a few months of training, slowly rolling out the learned strategies over the past several months. After all the gathering of information is done, the team will report on stories that deal with the community’s concerns. Some of the interviewed young voters were recorded for their questions to be featured on upcoming broadcasts when their questions are answered.
The series of election-related coverage and candidate interviews will kick off soon and run for about a month until election day, Tuesday, Nov. 5. Election day will mark the end of this iteration of the project, but Breen said the skills and methods the team has learned along the way will inform the station’s coverage going forward as they seek to report news for and with the community rather than on it.
“That’s really going to give us a good foundation to go forward with that sort of community-focused lens for all of our reporting after that,” Breen said.
To listen to KUAR’s election coverage, tune in to 89.1 FM or visit https://www.ualrpublicradio.org/.
READ ALSO: I-30 Traffic Flow to Shift in Coming Months
Source link : http://www.bing.com/news/apiclick.aspx?ref=FexRss&aid=&tid=6705b4edaeae4cf893a8b6604f0b744c&url=https%3A%2F%2Farmoneyandpolitics.com%2Fpublic-radio-political-reporting%2F&c=14160115892269678297&mkt=en-us
Author :
Publish date : 2024-09-26 05:55:00
Copyright for syndicated content belongs to the linked Source.
