This year, 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. 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.”
Maria Gardner Lara, Yvonne Boose, Jenna Dooley and Peter Medlin celebrated the station’s INBA awards in September 2023.
Maria Gardner Lara won a first place “Crystal Mic” award for her bilingual story “More than a Game,” which explored the family ties, community and Mexican roots of the DeKalb Sycamore soccer league. Yvonne Boose took first place for her podcast Poetically Yours, as well as a second-place prize in Use of Sound. Peter Medlin earned a first-place award for Best Writing for his education reporting and second place for his Teachers’ Lounge podcast. Former staffer Juanpablo Ramirez-Franco earned second place in the Best Reporter category.
Boose, in particular has focused on building a community of northern Illinois poets through Poetically Yours. The program has been running as a weekly 90-second segment for about two years. Boose was motivated to add a monthly extended podcast starting in December 2022, with each episode focused on one local poet.
Arts and Culture Reporter Yvonne Boose and New Director Jenna Dooley represented WNIJ at the INBA Convention in Urbana, IL.
“The poems were great in our one-and-a-half-minute segment,” Boose says, “but I wanted our audience to know more about the poets who were delivering these mini messages.”
Boose says a local poetry podcast is important for several reasons.
“Poets have a certain level of vulnerability because they sometimes share things that most people won’t,” Boose says. “I think having a poetry podcast helps remind our listeners that they are not alone in their life’s journey. Having a poetry podcast is also important to me because it introduces the art to those who may not have had any interest in it. It could also inspire poets who have stopped writing to pick up their poetry tools and create again.”
According to Dooley, this desire to dig beyond the surface to present a more immersive story is what makes WNIJ special.
“Every member of the WNIJ news team is truly invested in their reporting,” Dooley says. “They are constantly looking and listening for immersive ways to tell stories that go beyond just a short headline. These elements allow the audience to really feel like they are right there with the reporter during the duration of the broadcast story. The reporter is taking the listener along on that journey through sound.”
As the team looks ahead to 2024, they hope to reach new audiences with accurate, timely and reliable information, including robust, non-partisan election information that will help voters make informed choices at the ballot box.
