A two-year grant that has helped fund Arkansas Public Media, a consortium of four public radio stations, expires Sunday, forcing the group to eliminate three positions and reduce one to part time, Nathan Vandiver, its interim general manager, said Friday.
But Arkansas Public Media won't go off the air, Vandiver stressed. "We're looking for other funding to expand journalism in the state," he said.
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting in 2015 awarded a $278,300 grant to the fledgling effort, aimed at airing high-quality, in-depth news reporting, especially on education, health, energy, agriculture and justice, across the state. The grant mainly went for salaries of four new hires -- a managing editor, two reporters and a partner manager, whose job was to secure and oversee grants -- some equipment and travel expenses, Vandiver said.
He said the coordinated effort by radio stations at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock (KUAR), the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville (KUAF), Arkansas State University (KASU) and a public radio station in Texarkana (KTXK) will continue.
With the loss of two full-time reporters, the group will turn to freelancers for its news gathering, Vandiver said. Arkansas Public Media also will be able to use the work of reporters at its radio-station partners, he said. The managing editor's position will be eliminated, with those duties being taken over in-house at KUAR, he said.
The effort to secure grants, he said, will be moved to part time because a number of grant applications for another $160,000 remain outstanding.
"Our collaboration and partnerships are continuing," Vandiver said. "Story production will continue. The partnerships are more established, and so I think we've laid a lot of good groundwork to keep moving forward."
Arkansas Public Media also continues to have close relationships with the Arkansas Educational Television Network (AETN) in Conway and the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, a branch of the Central Arkansas Library System, Vandiver said.
Vandiver said Arkansas Public Media, during the two-year grant period, produced 226 in-depth news stories and one feature documentary and raised about $50,000 in private funds on its own. "We've had success on the Web, on social media," he said. "Our partners want to continue to expand."
Reporters for Arkansas Public Media last fall also swept the top three awards for hard news reporting for radio and podcasts in 2017's Diamond Journalism Awards, a regional contest sponsored by the Arkansas Pro Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. The award-winning coverage was on the Arkansas Freedom of Information Act, industrial earthquakes in Arkansas and Oklahoma, and a white-nationalist rally in Batesville.
It also won a second-place award for investigative reporting and a third-place award for feature reporting.
The group effort also has several finalists for this year's Diamond Journalism Awards, with winners to be announced Oct. 25.
Vandiver became interim general manager after the death in March 2016 of Ben Fry, the long-time manager of KUAR and who came up with the idea of Arkansas Public Media.
Business on 09/29/2018