Great news in the Champlain Valley

I’m just back from an annual gathering of public radio news directors — people who do what I do at local stations all over the country. We talk about issues facing the “industry” and out particular stations, trade tech talk and advice, share gripes, network, meet some of the biggies from NPR and the BBC.  It’s a useful and fun working getaway.

I’m not the first person to note that journalists are a very self-congratulatory crowd. Awards for this and that, from this and that organization. I think that’s not a bad thing, though, to have your very public work judged — yay or nay — year after year. So the news directors group, Public Radio News Directors, Inc. (PRNDI) runs a contest. It’s the only one just for public radio newsrooms, at local stations, and it’s peer-judged, so it tends to mean a lot to us station news people.

According to the PRNDI judges this year, our North Country audience is particularly well-served. Here’s a photo of me and Ross Sneyd of Vermont Public Radio with our five awards (collectively).

Our stations are in different divisions, BTW  — VPR in the “big” station groups and NCPR in the m”medium” group, based on how many people in the newsroom — so we don’t compete head-to-head.

VPR:  first place for soft news feature: “Homeless Family Puts Down Roots”; and second place for commentary: “Cosmic Ambiguity”; and second place for spot news:  “The death of Olympian Andrea Mead Lawrence.”

NCPR: first place for enterprise/investigative reporting: Hackett’s Underwater”; second place for interview: “Dede Scozzafava on the Heart and Soul of the GOP”; and second place for continuing coverage: “A Year of Hard Choices.”

Yay for us!