We’re thrilled that our colleagues in WNIJ 89.5 FM, northern Illinois’ local NPR affiliate and the broadcasting arm of Northern Illinois University, brought home six awards from the Illinois News Broadcasters Association in September, including three first place “Crystal Mic” awards.
Arts and Culture Reporter Yvonne Boose and New Director Jenna Dooley represented WNIJ at the INBA Convention in Urbana, IL.
These awards are just the most recent in the station’s winning streak, and they’re the result of a dedicated focus on in-depth, community-engaged local reporting.
WNIJ News Director Jenna Dooley says, “Over the past five years, we have built our newsroom around a ‘beat’ system—allowing our reporters to go beyond general assignment reporting to focus their news gathering efforts on specific topics including the environment, education, policy and the arts. This has led to a deeper level of engagement with the public we serve. The audience knows that we cover these important topics with care and attention, so they reach out to us with story ideas that we may have missed or are simply not aware of yet. This has yielded investigative pieces as well as sound-rich profiles of interesting people doing amazing achievements in our community that previously may have gone unnoticed.”
Read the full story to learn more about how engaged community reporting had strengthened WNIJ.
