KBIA-FM Wins National Edward R. Murrow Award for Its Website

The Honor Recognizes Outstanding Work by Missouri Journalism Students and Professional Staff

By Hope Kirwan

Columbia, Mo. (June 24, 2014) — KBIA-FM is a winner of a 2014 National Edward R. Murrow Award, the Radio Television Digital News Association announced on June 11. The award honors outstanding achievements in electronic journalism.

2014 Edward R. Murrow Award
2014 Edward R. Murrow Award

In the category for Website, KBIA was selected from 11 regional nominees in the small market radio division. The station is one of the top NPR-member stations in the nation.

“I’m proud of our news team and the way they have embraced reporting across digital platforms,” said General Manager Mike Dunn. “We are thrilled that they have now won three national Murrow awards in the last 10 years.”

News Director Janet Saidi said the station’s website focuses on engagement with its audience. A team of Missouri School of Journalism students and a professional staff produce the content. Ryan Famuliner serves as assistant news director.

“I feel like we’re always working to make our station better, and we are going to continue to make it better in the future,” she said.

The formal Murrow entry included a variety of stories that were published to KBIA’s website:

  • The Ties that Bind” is a series of short multimedia documentaries telling the stories of people in rural communities in Missouri.
  • Rural Missouri Town Now a Ghost of a Past Settlement” is about Goss, one of the state’s smallest towns.
  • Military Voices.” StoryCorps came to KBIA to gather stories for its Military Voices series. Because StoryCorps only airs one out of every 100 of its interviews, it allowed KBIA to produce the interviews gathered in our studios to be aired and posted on the station’s website.
  • Winter Storm Live Blogs.” As major winter storms hit mid-Missouri, KBIA created liveblogs as the weather events were occurring, to update the public with the latest information, images and video of the storm and its aftermath. These posts had some of the highest traffic of any stories on KBIA.org all year, and allowed the station to inform the public online when it was not on the air mid-day.
  • The Missouri Drone Project,” founded by KBIA content director Scott Pham, used drone technology to gather video for stories to be published on kbia.org. Although the project is currently on hiatus, the link includes stories that were created as part of the project.
  • KBIA’s weekly talk show “Intersection.”
  • Como Explained” was a weekly hyper-local podcast that explained local news issues and also took on fun topics to engage the digital audience. As an experiment, this was produced solely for the digital space and did not air on KBIA 91.3.
  • True/False Conversations” is a series of interviews with directors of documentaries that screen at the world-renown True False Film Festival in Columbia. The interviews air and are posted online in the weeks before the festival begins.
  • This interactive map allows Missourians to estimate how much an ACA Health Care Plan may cost compared to other areas in the state.
  • Their Dreams, In Their Own Words” interviewed young immigrants and refugees who have big dreams. The segment is part of the “In the Shadows of the Slaughterhouse” series.
  • 10 Songs You Should Know Going to Roots N Blues N BBQ.”

In April, KBIA received three awards on the regional level in the categories for Website, Feature Reporting and Continuing Coverage.

KBIA has won two other national Murrow awards. In 2006, the station received the small market radio award for News Documentary. KBIA also won the small market radio award for Investigative Reporting in 2007.

RTDNA will recognize KBIA at an awards banquet on Oct. 6 in New York City.

Updated: July 27, 2020

Related Stories

Expand All Collapse All