Why we think we’re worth it

With our on-air Spring Fundraiser launching at the crack o’ dawn on Monday, it’s time to once again make a case for why NCPR continues to merit the support of the communities we serve. Since I bought in to the proposition long ago, you might take what I say on the matter with a grain of salt. But I think, in this case, the product can speak for itself.

As this year’s theme “Dig Deeper” asserts, we think the value proposition for our audience lies in the deep approach we take to topics. You may have read what I had to say last week about Sarah Harris’s stories on homeless students in North Country schools. We could have taken the top-level, just-the-facts approach–3,218 homeless students in the North Country, 697 in St. Lawrence County. But Sarah brought us the people behind the numbers, and the communities that try to better their lives, exploring their story for months before turning out some the strongest reporting we have ever seen.

This week the Prison Time Media Project is taking the full week to explore the many human, economic and political dimensions of mass incarceration and its effects on communities in the North Country and throughout New York. Natasha Haverty and Brian Mann take you to communities devastated by the War on Drugs, and devastated by the closure of prisons that were the lifeblood of the community. Over the full year of this project, you have met people giving birth in prison and dying in prison and trying to make their way in society after release from prison. And you will have heard from advocates and policy-makers inside and outside the system, and across the spectrum of opinion on the issues.

Today, David Sommerstein published the second installment of a Year on the Farm series that dives deep into the lives of one farming operation throughout the course of the seasons, putting human faces on the production and marketing of the most basic of human commodities–food. The art, business and mission of food producers is an old story that reinvents itself with every generation that takes to life on the land. No one covers farming and food in the North Country in as thorough-going and innovative a manner as NCPR, in my opinion.

Digging Deeper is also a hallmark of our network partner and the other national producers that in sum make up what we call public radio and public media. Our strength as a system is not in having a camera crew in the air before the rubble stops bouncing.  It’s not in wall-to-wall coverage of who’s hottest and newest on the cultural scene. We tell the stories behind the events and the facts. We explore what artists and musicians themselves think of what they create, and we look over the often overlooked, to discover important new voices and talents.

We’re worth it, because we “Dig Deeper.”

We dig deeper for reasons of curiosity and delight and discovery, and we dig deeper because that is what you pay us for. That’s the deal. We could shake on it, or you could just make a gift to North Country Public Radio right now.

Tags: listeningpost