By Isabella Shevetz
WKMS, Murray State’s local NPR station affiliate, won a prestigious Murrow Award, and the station continues to provide opportunities for student reporters to connect to the larger world of broadcast news.
Mason Galemore (‘23), a former student reporter at WKMS, authored and researched the piece that won. WKMS won the Murrow Award for “audio hard news broadcasting in the student work division.”
“It’s so rewarding having one of our students win one of journalism’s highest awards while working here,” said Derek Operle, WKMS news director. “It’s really what we’re working toward with our student reporters.”
Galemore’s winning piece “The average age of farmers is going up. Kentucky’s young agricultural producers say it’s out of their control” was the end product of countless interviews and intense research, cementing the piece as a true investigative hard news story.
“[Winning the award] has put me on cloud nine,” Galemore said. “It has renewed my confidence as a journalist and is a great testament to journalism at Murray State and in West Kentucky.”
After graduating, Galemore began his dream job working for National Public Radio in Alaska.
To keep riding the high of the national recognition the Murrow award has brought it, WKMS is working hard to make sure student reporters have access to all the resources they need to create award-winning journalistic pieces.
By treating student reporters as professional journalists, the staff at the station give students the opportunity to learn how to get connected in their community, and how to find the interesting stories in their area.
“It is basically on-the-job training,” Operle said. “We work with them to teach them everything they need to know to become an audio and multimedia journalist… and that experience is invaluable.”
While student reporters work entirely with the personnel at WKMS, their stories have the opportunity to be aired on other regional public radio stations, like Kentucky Public Radio and various stations in the Nashville and Cincinnati areas. Connecting small town journalism students to larger cities and their surrounding viewer areas, WKMS opens the door for student journalists to have their work aired in highly populated regions.
WKMS also helps student journalists experience what the field will be like in the future. By using student perspectives, WKMS links the interests of the student population at Murray State to the interests and information needs of the community as a whole, and through NPR affiliation, brings global news perspectives to a small town.
