The Monroe County Radio Project has continued to produce the News at Noon broadcast three times a week for WHFI-FM, a community radio station owned and operated by the Monroe County School Board.
The project, however, has spent the spring dealing with some reporter setbacks. A VISTA worker hired and trained to report news for the station and cover community meetings had to leave in January because of a serious illness. And two Monroe County high school students hired to produce regular features about the school and the community needed more oversight to generate regular stories.
High School teacher Mark Blevins and another VISTA worker Karen Geiss have scrambled to fill the shows. Meanwhile, the school district has assigned five Americorps workers to begin covering stories in the community, and West Virginia University journalism professors and students were working to get them trained in basic reporting techniques and the use of radio equipment.
This has caused the radio project to adjust short-term goals “to help WHFI-FM get through this crisis and stay on the air,” said Maryanne Reed, project leader and dean of the P.I. Reed School of Journalism at West Virginia University. The ultimate goal is still to broadcast a news show five days a week and to produce content for a website.
Reed planned to return to Monroe County to recruit more VISTA volunteers and train them in basic news reporting and to oversee the project’s progress. The project is also working on launching a WHFI website and training two Americorps workers to update the site.
“The real struggle is to get people there,” Reed said. The project was also planning a public relations campaign, developed by a WVU grad student, to find some more VISTA workers to report and produce news and boost listenership.
University facilitators are also boosting feedback to the project’s adult supervisors and student and volunteer reporters. In the meantime, WVU students will produce stories in Morgantown for airing on the station.
“We are making progress but learning the hard way that this process takes time, effort and patience and that we need to be more responsive to the needs of the people in Monroe County, rather than expect them to accommodate our goals and timetable,” Reed said in her progress report.
