KOSU Public Radio CPB Local Content and Services Report FY2018

CPB Station Activity Survey

1. Describe your overall goals and approach to address identified community issues, needs, and interests through your station’s vital local services, such as multiplatform long and short-form content, digital and in-person engagement, education services, community information, partnership support, and other activities, and audiences you reached or new audiences you engaged.

KOSU is a leader in community engagement and broadcast and digital content that serves as an important resource for citizens to make sense of today’s complex world. KOSU began broadcasting on December 29, 1955. In 1971, we became the 100th NPR station and began broadcasting at 100.00 watts. In 2005, KOSU began operating a second station, 107.5 KOSN, serving Tulsa and northeastern Oklahoma. A second Stillwater station, 88.3 KOSR, was added in 2010 and a Ponca City translator began operations in 2013. KOSU broadcasts from studios in downtown . Our goals are to open windows to a larger world of ideas an opinions and cultures. We seek to create community through the content we deliver and we create content in partnership with the communities we serve.

KOSU’s broadcast stations are owned by Oklahoma State University and operate from the Hart building in Oklahoma City’s historic Film Row, and from production studios on the OSU Stillwater campus and in the Tulsa Arts District in downtown Tulsa. Our organizational structure, use of resources and strategic community partnerships are designed to provide localized content and community activities reflecting the needs and interests of the diverse population we serve. Our station assets include nearly five- thousand listener contributors, a dedicated staff and volunteers, our radio broadcast and digital media infrastructure and our relationships with community partners. These assets coalesce to serve the public interest by creating widespread awareness of community issues and opportunities for stakeholders to engage with these issues. KOSU’s local content focus areas, as identified in partnership with the station's non-fiduciary Community Advisory Board, include education, health, energy, the environment and criminal justice and how these issues intersect with public policy. Our initiatives consistently receive widespread support from our community and listener stakeholders as reported to the Corporation for , NPR and other key local and national partners who help create and fund projects. More than three million people in Oklahoma, southeast Kansas, southwest Missouri and northwest Arkansas live in KOSU’s broadcast coverage area. Our administrative headquarters are located on the campus of Oklahoma State University - Stillwater, and our primary content headquarters are located in Oklahoma City, home to 620,602 residents, of whom 62% are Caucasian,17% are Hispanic/Latino, 15% are Black, 4% are Asian, and 3.5% are American Indian/Alaska Native.

To serve these audiences, KOSU, as part of a multi-station reporting collaboration, commissioned a scientific poll in 2018 to determine the primary concerns of Oklahomans. KOSU also held a community forum on the 2018 election to gather feedback from listeners about the issues they care about as well as the stations coverage of these issues. Our goal was, and is, to create local news content that listeners need to know to be informed citizens and to make informed decisions focusing on the issues they care about. As a staff, and as part of our multi-station reporting collaboration, team meetings were held monthly to determine the platforms and treatment for the issues we identified through polling and community feedback events. Special emphasis was placed on reporting outside of the state’s two largest metropolitan areas, Oklahoma City and Tulsa to hear from residents in rural Oklahoma who often are underrepresented in the local media.

For KOSU’s collaborative election coverage, public radio journalists fanned out across the state reporting from 32 communities in the production of 56 feature length and spot news stories. Original web content also featured four video explainers detailing the state questions on the ballot in 2018.

2. Describe key initiatives and the variety of partners with whom you collaborated, including other public media outlets, community nonprofits, government agencies, educational institutions, the business community, teachers and parents, etc. This will illustrate the many ways you’re connected across the community and engaged with other important organizations in the area.

KOSU provided the following key services in 2018, community engagement and partnerships with organizations working to improve public media’s connection with local communities, local broadcasts, news reports, features, documentaries and series featuring coverage of issues specific to education, energy, the environment, and natural resources, online digital media services including live and on- demand audio streaming, video storytelling and community information.

KOSU was a lead participant in the multi-station collaboration Oklahoma Engaged: Project Public Office. Through this project, KOSU and the other participating public radio stations sought to create a singular editorial focus in coverage of the 2018 election cycle on behalf of a collective weekly listening audience of 240,000. As a result, Oklahoma Engaged: Project Public Office was one of the largest news gathering operations in Oklahoma de voted to contextual coverage of the 2018 election. This citizen-centric, multi- platform journalism utilized multiple data gathering processes to identify the issues of greatest importance to the electorate and then originated reporting and digital explainers to raise awareness of those issues. The simulcast of election night (KOSU and KGOU) broke new ground in the stations collaborative reporting efforts, and their combined election night watch party engaged the community a whole new way through a nonpartisan political watch party.

All of these efforts were built on the previous collaborative reporting initiative supported by the Kirkpatrick Foundation as part of the Oklahoma Voter Guide during the 2016 election cycle. This election reporting received numerous national and regional awards for broadcast and digital journalism excellence and innovation and KOSU’s collective election reporting is being used as a case study among participants and with other public media organizations, as they explore options to increase the commitment to collaborative journalism.

KOSU continues as a lead participant in an ongoing collaborative reporting initiative, StateImpact Oklahoma. KOSU, KGOU and KWGS co-fund original feature-length reporting that focuses on education, health, criminal justice, energy, and the environment. KOSU partnered with various news organizations to produce original reporting, including NPR Embedded, the Center for Investigative Reporting (Reveal), the Frontier, and Keiser Health News Stories produced through the collaboration. Among other things, profiled EPA chief Scott Pruitt’s political rise, explored the high cost of rural air ambulance services, followed the money of a recovery services organization and chronicled the two-week walkout by Oklahoma teachers. KOSU continued its collaboration with The Spy, an online music station based in Oklahoma City. IN 2018, KOSU continued work to convert The Spy to KOSU’s radio automation and delivery system to improve efficiencies and on-air sound. Many of KOSU/The Spy’s weekly music shows are produced at KOSU including The Oklahoma Rock Show, Tune in Tulsa and the Red Dirt Radio Hour. The Spy is deeply involved in the local community and their contract hosts are frequently immersed in community engagement activities, local music festivals, retail and eating venues. Collectively, KOSU and The Spy represent one of the few broadcast outlets in Oklahoma that dedicates much of its airtime to the work of local musicians. By raising awareness of their work, KOSU and The Spy are amplifying the Oklahoma experience through the lyrics and melodies created by homegrown musicians.

KOSU also partnered with various community and educational organizations in 2018.

In February and March, KOSU partnered with StoryCorps to bring their mobile recording booth to Oklahoma City. For five weeks, StoryCorps captured conversations between Oklahomans that were edited and broadcast through 2018. Through these stories, KOSU has sought to strengthen its role in defining Oklahoma’s sense of place.

In October, the station served as a sponsor of Oklahoma Humanities’ Curiosity Fest, a day-long festival in downtown Oklahoma City bringing the academic humanities to the general public in engaging and accessible ways. This annual celebration of the humanities featured Jad Abumrad, creator of NPR’s RadioLab.

KOSU partnered with the Tulsa-based storytelling organization OKSO to bring the Moth Mainstage to Oklahoma for only the second time. A sellout crowd of nearly 800 people packed Cain’s Ballroom in mid- November for an evening of live storytelling by local and national writers and orators in an evening designed to celebrate the human experience.

Also in November, KOSU partnered with Oklahoma State University to bring the host of NPR’s Planet Money, Robert Smith, to Stillwater and Tulsa. Smith spoke to business students at Oklahoma State University and business and entrepreneurial leaders in Tulsa about his show and the rise of podcasting.

KOSU and OSU’s School of Media and Strategic Communications also partnered to bring NPR’s Next Generation Workshop to Oklahoma for the second consecutive year. Five students, from Oklahoma State, The and Oklahoma City Community College were selected and paired with working professionals to conceptualize and produce multi-platform content that KOSU aired and posted online.

3. What impact did your key initiatives and partnerships have in your community? Describe any known measurable impact, such as increased awareness, learning or understanding about particular issues. Describe indicators of success, such as connecting people to needed resources or strengthening conversational ties across diverse neighborhoods. Did a partner see an increase in requests for related resources? Please include direct feedback from a partner(s) or from a person(s) served.

The impact of our key initiatives and partnerships in our community has been significant. From increased awareness of various organizations and what they offer to providing a deeper understanding of issues significant to people and our various communities, KOSU’s reach and impact are greatly enhanced by working with others throughout Oklahoma by developing new partnerships and maintaining and strengthening existing partnerships, out networks allow us the opportunity to provide information to people we may not have reached before, and allow us the opportunity to provide greater context to the significant issues. Throughout the five sections of this CPB Local Content and Services, Report, we have indicated some of the measurable impacts.

4. Please describe any efforts (e.g. programming, production, engagement activities) you have made to investigate and/or meet the needs of minority and other diverse audiences (including, but not limited to, new immigrants, people for whom English is a second language, and illiterate adults) during Fiscal Year 2018, and any plans you have made to meet the needs of these audiences during Fiscal Year 2019. If you regularly broadcast in a language other than English, please note the language broadcast.

KOSU partnered with StoryCorps to bring the StoryCorps mobile recording booth to Oklahoma City in 2018. The stories airing on KOSU from the mobile recording sessions emphasized a diversity of voices reflecting the entire community. These are examples of some of the stories aired by KOSU: Ngoc Nguyen was in the tenth grade when she dropped out of high school. It was following the Vietnam War, her dad was in prison, and she needed to go to work to support her family. Years later, after she had immigrated to Oklahoma, she went back to school to finish what she started…to get her GED, and that’s where she met her teacher Chris Myers. They came to the StoryCorps mobile booth in Oklahoma City to talk about their journey to help her complete her goal. IN the summer of 1994 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Brandy Carpenter, then 14, had just started dating her crush, 17-year-old De’Marchoe Carpenter. Before they even had their first kiss, De’Marchoe was arrested for a murder he didn’t commit. De’Marchoe, 41, and Brandy, 38, remember what first drew them to each other and the toil that prison took on their relationship. Cynthia Calloway and her husband Roosevelt grew up on the opposite sides of Florida and had very different childhood experiences as young African American kids in the 1960s. They came to the StoryCorps mobile booth in Oklahoma City to talk about how those experiences shaped their outlooks on life.

A second-generation American talks about her pride in being the daughter of Vietnamese immigrants. A new four-part series premieres on PBS on October 23rd featuring two Oklahoma tribes and other Indigenous communities and ancient ruins and mounds. Oklahoma documentarian and Comanche Citizen Julianna Brannum produces the series Native America and recently sat down to talk to KOSU’s Kateleigh Mills.

StateImpact Oklahoma examined the SCOTUS decision to review a murder appeal that could upend state and tribal jurisdiction in Oklahoma.

KOSU hosted The Moth Mainstage in Tulsa in November, featuring a local Native American storyteller recounting his youth in Oklahoma.

KOSU aired the NPR interview with Olivia Hooker, the last survivor of the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921. On May 31, 1921, six-year-old Olivia Hooker was home with her family in Tulsa, Oklahoma when a group of white men came through the backyard carrying torches. Her mother quickly hid Olivia and her three siblings under the dining room table, covering them with a tablecloth and told them not to make a sound.

In 2019, KOSU will begin a strategic planning process that will determine station priorities from 2020 to 2025. As part of the planning process, KOSU will seek input from minority audiences about the station’s current service and how it can improve its service to minorities.

5. Please assess the impact that your CPB funding had on your ability to serve your community. What were you able to do with your grant that you wouldn’t be able to do if you didn’t receive it?

CPB funding plays a critical role in KOSU’s ability to serve Oklahoma media consumers relevant content and national and international news and information. The cost of purchasing programs from NPR, PRI, APM, PRX and other producers continues to rise and CPB funding helps KOSU pay for program acquisition and the production of local content. Building on this critical support, KOSU is able to leverage CPB dollars to raise money from the community. Our Oklahoma Engaged election collaboration was made possible by two $50,000 grants from Kirkpatrick Foundation and the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation. KOSU and KGOU also received $250,000 from the Records Johnston Foundation to grow the StateImpact Oklahoma reporting collaboration that connects policy to people in the areas of education, the environment, health and criminal justice. Without this seed money, many mid-sized and small stations, primarily in rural areas of the United States, would cease to exist. Our stations represent some of the last locally owned media and are increasingly important as for-profit journalism continues to shrink thanks to corporate media ownership that routinely guts local print and broadcast journalism resources to shore up profits.

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