IowaWatch Wins Top Broadcast News Awards For Politics, Farm And Agribusiness Reporting

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The IowaWatch Connection radio program collected seven awards — including first place for political coverage and farm/agribusiness reporting — for large market radio reporting during 2018 at the annual Iowa Broadcast News Association convention in Johnston, Iowa, on Saturday, April 13, 2019. The radio program had won first place the previous year, too, for farm and agribusiness reporting. The program is part of IowaWatch’s multimedia reporting effort. Each week, program host and producer Jeff Stein and IowaWatch reporters examine a story in depth during a 23-minute program that airs on 21 radio stations and then serves as an IowaWatch.org podcast. The program’s winning entries were:

First place: Political coverage for reporting on year-round interest in politics.

freedom of information

IowaWatch Co-Founder Returning To Iowa To Headline Sept. 27 Celebrating A Free Press And Open Government Banquet

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Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author Stephen J. Berry, whose push for journalists to work thoroughly and ethically led him to co-found the Iowa Center for Public Affairs Journalism-IowaWatch, will be the annual Celebrating a Free Press and Open Government Banquet’s guest speaker in Des Moines on Thursday, September 27, 2018.

broadcast excellence

IowaWatch Connection Hits Milestone — 200 Programs

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The IowaWatch Connection radio report, part of a statewide audience engagement program, premiered July 5-6, 2014, as a 13-week experiment that would spread reporting by IowaWatch.org to a statewide radio audience. Two-hundred programs had been produced as of the weekend of April 27-29, 2018. This is a podcast of the 200th program. It revisits two stories that took top honors in the recent Iowa Broadcast News Association awards contest:

First place: Farm and Business reporting, for a report on foreign farmland ownership in the Midwest that featured a Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting story on that topic. First place: General Reporting, for a report on Iowa’s capacity for future rail traffic.