KALW Audio Academy Closes the Year Helping to Grow the Station’s National Presence
By Guest Blogger Ben Trefny, News Director, KALW
I’ll start this week by bragging about KALW’s increasing national presence, thanks to the Audio Academy.
Audio Academy student Olivia Cueva had her second story in a week air on NPR’s All Things Considered, again in partnership with Youth Radio. It was about the ongoing protests that are disrupting business as usual in the Bay Area:
Protests Over Officer-Involved Deaths Continue Nationwide
Then Audio Academy reporting fellow Todd Whitney landed an NPR spot story about the big storms that hit the Bay Area on Thursday.
While the national audience is getting more exposure to what our trainees can do, our local audience is really getting an earful. Colin Peden helped us produce an extra 12 minutes of coverage on Monday focused on the demonstrations. Reporting fellow Jeremy Dalmas and Hannah Kingsley-Ma helped us produce another 10 minutes of coverage on the biggest storms to hit the Bay Area in years. This report includes Hannah’s first voiced work:
How the Biggest Storm in Years Affected the Bay
Reporting fellow Liz Mak had a really cool story this week as part of our Audiograph project, about the San Francisco Flower Mart:
Audiograph’s Sound of the Week: San Francisco Flower Mart
And former Audio Academy second year member Angela Johnston was instrumental in creating this show about robots, their uses, and the ethical questions around them, which aired on Monday, December 8:
We’re creating a new balance of long-form, beautifully produced features on Crosscurrents paired with scene-rich, day-of regional news inserted into NPR’s national programs. It’s making for really robust coverage of the Bay Area from KALW, and it’s resulting, too, in a very comprehensive education and experience for the Audio Academy.
The year 2014 is closing with a lot of strong content in our news department, and I think everybody in our newsroom is very excited to see what we will produce in 2015.