RTDNA 2023 - NCPR - Overall Excellence
North Country Public Radio’s news department, based in predominantly rural, economically disadvantaged northern New York state, has developed a national reputation for being “the little newsroom that punches above its weight.”
With a team of just seven full-time reporters, including News Director David Sommerstein, NCPR News produces a daily (M-F) morning news magazine, Northern Light, a daily afternoon news podcast, NCPR’s Story of the Day, four morning newscasts during NPR’s Morning Edition, a robust website, and interactive social media channels. We also engage with a wider audience regularly via text through our Groundsource-based NCPR Texting Club, which has grown from 180 to 580 sources in just two years.
From urgent breaking news to deep enterprise reporting on complex issues to features that capture the range of daily life, NCPR’s news team uses every format and tool we can to tell stories in the most creative and compelling ways possible, with the utmost journalistic integrity. We are deeply rooted in and committed to the northern New York region, known as the North Country, a place that struggles with poverty and isolation, and a waning local media landscape to hold officials accountable. Our team plants a flag for regional journalism.
Our mottos are “get out of the building” to find the human voices that make our region unique, and “have more fun” to make sure we balance the urgent news of the day with a range of features that celebrate resilience in everyday life. We use surveys and call-outs to engage our audience and develop stories in and with the communities we serve.
NCPR is also very committed to seeking out the most diverse range of voices we can. Even though the North Country is very white, our communities include people from all races and backgrounds. Our entry shows that we tell their stories year-round, not just when race, gender, or other forms of diversity are in the headlines.
AUDIO ENTRY RUNDOWN:
Daily newscast/news magazine - Northern Light - A sample of our daily (M-F) morning news magazine captures the range of newsy and human interest stories, including weather updates after a strong storm, a deeply reported feature about a rural road that become a conduit for tens of thousands of migrants to seek asylum in Canada, a feature on how climate change is endangering a regional open-air skating attraction, and a series about birding in the North Country lands with two experts out on a walk at a local college.
https://www.northcountrypublicradio.org/shows/northern-light
0:00-1:20 Northern Light billboard for 3/15/23
https://www.northcountrypublicradio.org/news/story/47503/20230315/northern-light-3-15-2023
Excerpts from Northern Light 3/15/23:
1:23 - 3:38 Enterprise reporting connecting local and international events We're especially proud of how we connect global and national news to the North Country every chance we get. We lead Northern Light with a deeply reported feature on how a local dead-end road has become a pathway to seek asylum in Canada for tens of thousands of migrants. Here's local reaction to the war in Ukraine less than 24 hours after it began.
3:38 - 4:50 important weather/public safety and community-relevant news Passing critical weather and public safety information to the public is our essential duty. This news about cleanup and warming stations after a storm was featured heavily in newscasts throughout the morning, including just before Northern Light. But we wanted to give it more mention here on the show. Then we followed it up with something people love to hear about — a boys' basketball team making it to the state championships!
4:55 - 5:30 connecting reporters with our listeners NCPR strives to get out into the community as much as possible, producing sound-rich features about the people and places that make our region unique. We also love to share sounds and experiences we hear along the way. Our reporters regularly appear on Northern Light to share what they encounter. Here, Adirondack reporter Emily Russell shares an unusually loud birdcall (which leads into our arts/nature segment).
5:33 - 6:17 Arts and nature features & interviews Every day of the show, Monica Sandreczki and Todd Moe produce an arts or nature-related feature, usually in person. The segment spotlights the range of artistic expression across the region, gives arts organizations a platform to get the word out about their work, and explores how our residents engage with the natural world. Monica and Todd also sprinkle mentions of other arts and community events throughout the show. With the evaporation of many local media outlets, small organizations value more than ever our commitment to the arts.
6:18 - 6:32 connections with local musicians All of the music beds on Northern Light and Story of the Day were created by local musicians through our Underscore project, another example of how NCPR news strives to reflect and hold up the culture of northern New York as much as possible.
Daily news podcast - Story of the Day - This daily (M-F) podcast, which also airs on the radio weekday afternoons during NPR's All Things Considered at 5:48pm, features one highlight story for each day from the NCPR news team, plus a newscast of the latest breaking news of the day. The show has become a major vehicle for delivering breaking news during evening drive time. The podcast allows a slightly more casual, yet still professional, delivery. The podcast is released before the broadcast version, at 4pm.
https://www.northcountrypublicradio.org/shows/story-of-the-day
6:34 - 8:37 Excerpts from Story of the Day 3/15/23
8:40-14:25 Breaking news - in-depth reaction (full story) Breaking news is, of course, at the heart of our responsibility to the community. NCPR also strives to always put human faces and voices to those stories. The day after heavy rains and flooding devastated two communities in the central Adirondacks, we reported on the road closures and the clean-up effort, and also sent Emily Russell to capture the extent of the damage on a human scale.
14:26 - 19:28 Enterprise reporting/continuing coverage (excerpt) NCPR excels at finding stories that connect local, national, and international events, and sticking with them as they develop. This reporting from a convenience store in Plattsburgh is one in a series of stories by Cara Chapman about asylum seekers at Roxham Road (you hear another story in this continuing coverage in the Northern Light sample above). Migrants are stuck after being turned away from the border with nowhere to turn.
19:30 - 21:44 Investigative stories from deeply sourced beat reporting (excerpt) Reporters at NCPR are general assignment — we have a huge region to cover and our beats are based on geography. However, each reporter elects a "mini-beat", a specialty, often related to their geographic area, that allows them to dig deeper. Amy Feiereisel's award-winning coverage of child care and education led to this investigative scoop about a state grant that was causing recipients more harm than good.
21:45 - 25:24 - Focusing on diversity in history (excerpts as montage) NCPR chose to seek out underreported stories about Black history in the North Country's mostly white communities in 2023. What we found creates a far more nuanced picture of who lives here and why, and the role Black culture plays in the region. Our submission includes a telescope of three of those stories - the memories of a Black woman who grew up in an almost all-white mining town, a history of the Ku Klux Klan's influence on Black populations in the region, and a museum and Black artist working to bear witness to a possible lynching in the Adirondacks.
25:26 - 28:25 - In-depth series (excerpt) NCPR's newsroom produced five (!) multi-part series in 2023, on serious issues but also fun, community-building topics — rural health care, the 25th anniversary of the 1998 Ice Storm, libraries, birding, and public art and murals. All of these series were developed with our audience long before they aired through community engagement in the NCPR Texting Club. The audio for this entry is from the health care series, about the struggle to find home health care for older adults. You can also find an excerpt from the birding series earlier in the submission.
28:26 - 30:27 - Hard news spots (excerpts as montage) Daily hard news spots and coverage of our political leaders are the building blocks of our news agenda. Here is a quick telescope of three such stories — a fact-check of our Congresswoman's statements on a national stage, a federal prison lockdown, and a shipping worker strike.
30:30 - 36:55 Immersive, sound-rich features (excerpts) NCPR has built of reputation of not just telling the "bad news". We connect deeply with our community to meet people at the places that bring them joy and sustenance, like a local "Amazing Race" to bring people back downtown to an economically struggling community, and a carefree "crow" bike outing in Plattsburgh.
36:57 - 39:39 NCPR’s famous audio postcards (full story) For more than 25 years, NCPR has taken its listeners outdoors with sound-rich, delightful features, to the highest peaks of the Adirondacks in summer and winter, but also to closer-to-home outdoor spots, to highlight the vast role outdoor recreation plays in our region.
DIGITAL PRESENCE
NCPR prides itself on being a multiplatform journalism entity. We take just as much pride in our digital reporting as in our audio/radio/podcast work. We pay attention to layout, photography, data visualization, and more to tell a story.
Our digital team is relatively small, with only two full-time digital team members. One of them is a brand new social media specialist position launched in 2023. She works closely with our news team daily, which is very active digitally as well. She coordinates with reporters in the field to bring video and social media coverage to our award-winning broadcast/radio reporting, often going out with the reporters to film video herself.
While the team is small, the results are impressive. As a result of our enhanced social media presence in the past year plus our extra efforts on community engagement, we’ve seen over 20% growth in our following on Instagram and increased our engagement there by nearly 20% as well, with over 300% of the gain in engagements specifically on video and photo carousel content. NCPR’s Texting Club, based on the Groundsource platform, has grown from 180 to 580 sources in just two years.
Please include in our submission (at least take a glance at) the links above, which reflect the range of daily digital work in our reporting. Below you can find the five links we're including in this entry as specific examples of our digital work. (Only the 40-minute audio at the top of the page is the audio portion, not audio in below individual stories.)
Special series: Imperfect Solutions - Rural Health Care in the North Country (10/2/23-12/19/23)
NCPR’s digital work is built on its excellence in news coverage, journalistic integrity, and in-depth, enterprising reporting. The NCPR newsroom is well-known for its in-depth series that are rooted in community engagement and human voices that reflect real issues on the ground. Our series tool, built in-house, allows us to showcase this material in one handy place for the audience with easy navigation between stories.
It’s important to note that this series, and many others, also uses two other digital tools for community engagement: an online survey and a Groundsource-based texting club, both employed well before we begin reporting the series to refine our stories and find new, more diverse sources.
Stories in this series were viewed more than 12,000 times. An Instagram reel reporting back our survey/texting club findings was viewed over 2,700 times. Those are a lot for a rural area!
Instagram stories/highlights to cover break news (12/19/23)
https://www.instagram.com/stories/highlights/17991674546278883/
On December 19, 2023, heavy rains and rapid snowmelt caused dangerous flooding in the Adirondacks. By scouring social media in the early hours of the morning for flooding-related content, our Social Media Specialist, Caitlin Kelly. reached out to users to share their videos and photos of the destruction and flooding in their area.
This crowd-sourced data was then able to be shared on our platform to inform our audience of delays, road closures, and major flooding. These photos and videos were shared to our stories in real-time, as well as graphics and data from the National Weather Service.
Kelly then spent the afternoon driving major roadways in the Adirondacks to gather other material first-hand and to report from the scene. The culmination of those efforts now live in an Instagram Highlight on our profile, as well as multiple photo posts and reels from that day and days following.
Reels made with this footage gathered over 100,000 views.
Instagram video/reels to expand reach of audio stories (5/26/23)
https://www.instagram.com/p/CstOr2BgapO/
NCPR and its reporters regularly use social media both as teasers for upcoming stories but also as stories themselves. We know many people will never visit the story published on our website, so we use Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to bring the story to where the audience is at.
This year, NCPR invested and focused heavily on Instagram to reach a bigger and younger audience. We hired the station’s first Social Media Specialist, Caitlin Kelly, whose focus is on Instagram. She led us into new territory to find a larger audience for NCPR’s journalism.
Kelly innovated by coaching reporters to gather video as they reported, or she went with them on reporting trips herself. She built a technique of using those videos, mostly in the form of b-roll, and finding captivating imagery that would pair well with the audio the reporter was gathering. The final product resulted in a clip of audio gathered by the reporter, and a reel made with the video clips, along with trending audio to increase visibility.
For this reel, Kelly joined a reporter on a story about a Ukrainian boy who is attending a boarding school in Lake Placid. The reel was viewed over 7,000 times, received over 300 likes, was shared 67 times, and was saved by 16 users. It has a total watch time of over 20 hours. It reached over 2,800 of our followers, and over 3,000 non-followers.
Interactive map of murals and public art in northern New York (9/11/23)
We use digital to have lots of fun, too! We built on last year’s huge success of a map of the best local ice cream places in the region by taking the same approach to public art. Using our Groundsource-based texting club, we built an audience-generated interactive map of murals and other public art in northern New York, documenting dozens of examples, with brief write-ups and photos of each one. The map generated 6500 views to NCPR mural coverage, and over 2300 views on the Instagram carousel.
Use of archival photography: Ice Storm 25th Anniversary (1/6/23)
The Ice Storm of 1998 was a generational natural disaster that reshaped the entire culture of northern New York. We used community engagement via NCPR’s Texting Club and social media to encourage our audience to contribute archival photos and stories from a devastating month of bitter cold without electricity.
Photos were submitted to us by people from the community via several digital channels including directly through a callout on our website. NCPR built a visual and audio document of that time for an important anniversary to give residents a chance to reflect, remember, and take stock of what’s happened since. This was our most visited series of the year, having been viewed nearly 16,000 times on our website. We also saw tens of thousands of views on the photo carousels, galleries, and links we shared on social media.
And of course, we maintain active and busy NCPR social media channels on...
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/NorthCountryPublicRadio
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ncpr
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ncpr/?hl=en
