As World Vision Report wraps up, staff seeks allies at WAMU, WUNC

Published in Current, April 18, 2011
By Karen Everhart

World Vision Report put out its last freshly produced public radio show last week, but its producers have a plan to keep the weekly production going without its major funder.

In its seven-year run backed by the humanitarian-aid organization World Vision, the show won carriage on about 100 public radio stations and built a team of 115 far-flung reporters to bring new voices and human stories to international news coverage.

"We take a grassroots approach to looking at what happens in the news through the stories of everyday people," said Leda Hartman, assignment editor.

To keep the show alive, the producers plan to work without pay and adapt material from past shows to deliver updated episodes through May 6 as they work out a collaboration with WAMU-FM in Washington, D.C., and WUNC-FM in Chapel Hill, N.C.

The tentative plan: to work together on Latitudes, a weekly international news show that WAMU began piloting locally in February. To extend the pilot, the World Vision team would contribute reports to six new episodes of Latitudes for broadcast this summer.

World Vision Report and Latitudes share a common mission and preference for taking a "solutions-oriented approach" to reporting on local and global problems, said Andrea Wenzel, global affairs producer at WAMU. The first batch of Latitudes pilots was a "work in progress," she said. "We see room for playing around with them and improving on them," she said. Wenzel joined WAMU last summer after working for Chicago's WBEZ and, more recently, reporting in Afghanistan for the BBC World Service Trust.

"World Vision is a great program that speaks to the heart of the public radio mission, and it would be great if we could all collaborate together to maintain a high-quality, weekly international-affairs program in public radio," said Mark McDonald, WAMU p.d.

The production partnership is in its earliest stages. The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, based in Washington, D.C., and WBEZ also have participated in talks about keeping World Vision Report alive in spirit, if not in name, said Hartman.

The World Vision team [staff list], which includes Beverly Abel, Susan Shepherd, Julie Drizin and Jenny Schmidt, has experience with long-distance collaborations already — they're located in various places around the country.

"We all really love this and don't want to let it die without a fight," Hartman said. "All we need to do is add money and stir." She estimates that the team needs about $750,000 to stabilize the operation, which produced some 44 original episodes a year, offered free for broadcast on public radio stations.

Stories from World Vision Report have regularly earned national recognition, including Edward R. Murrow Awards, Gracie Allen Awards, and Gabriels.

World Vision, the humanitarian-aid organization that originated and funded the program, announced in March that it was ending its sponsorship, citing the need to redirect resources to its core mission.