Connections

Investing in our future

During the last two years, commercial television stations have devoted countless hours of airtime to reality-based programs.

While these programs capture our attention, no doubt you would agree with me that they do little to inform or enlighten us.

As more and more commercial media outlets move away from public affairs programming, we at WHYY are particularly proud, through the power of your support, to produce multimedia programs that explore issues and concerns of real importance to the people in the diverse communities that we serve. Our News and Public Affairs service is designed to provide you with the information you want and need to support your involvement in the issues that affect your lives.

This year, we produced close to 150 hours of original programming on WHYY-TV and nearly 1400 hours on WHYY-FM, with about 1420 of these hours dedicated to news and public affairs programs, including Delaware Tonight (the state's only local newscast) and Radio Times, as well as programs such as Issues PA: Meet the Candidates and A Conversation with John Nash. Of course, countless additional hours of related information can also be found on our Web site at www.whyy.org.

Our commitment to this type of programming remains as strong as ever, and our goal year over year is to increase the number of hours we invest in local public affairs productions and to reach a point in the future when one of our new digital signals is fully devoted to exploring various issues.

We are different than many other media outlets because we are able to produce and distribute content for TV and radio. This makes it possible for you to access us in many ways throughout your day. This is especially true of productions that fully utilize all on and off-air and online opportunities.

Take, for example, WHYY's Latina Health Project, one of our most ambitious, and successful, initiatives this year. We developed this project through our News and Public Affairs service to open up channels of discussion with our community like never before, allowing people to tell us what issues are important to them and helping us to best decide how to cover them.

By conducting a series of in-depth community focus groups, we learned that certain cultural barriers often inhibit Hispanic women in the Delaware Valley from seeking preventative health care. It is the unique concerns and perspectives of these women, and the health care providers and advocates who serve them, that guided the on and off-air components of the Latina Health Project.

Beyond producing Latina Salud: Body, Mind & Spirit, an original WHYY-TV documentary examining the health issues affecting Hispanic women in the Delaware Valley (which was followed by a live town meeting and panel discussion) and a live call-in show on WHYY-FM that explored the perspectives of young Latinas, we extended the impact of this project by hosting the Festival de Mujeres Conversando ("Women Talking Festival"), a free community event, conducted entirely in Spanish, which provided more than 150 women who attended with life-saving medical information.

We strengthened our efforts by partnering with organizations that share our goals, including the William Penn Foundation, GlaxoSmithKline and Al Dia, the region's leading Spanish-language newspaper. In addition, we partnered with Univision to broadcast the TV documentary, entirely in Spanish, in the tri-state region on WUVP TV65 beginning this month.

We also created a bilingual Web site at www.latinasalud.org, which serves as a clearinghouse for information and provides a place for people to share their thoughts and experiences regarding the major issues affecting Latinas in our region.

We are extremely proud of our efforts to engage citizens in a meaningful dialogue about the important issues that they face, sparking conversations that will ultimately lead to solutions. As we continue to build our service strands, we will use all of our resources to address a variety of topics, such as economic and lifestyle issues, giving everyone in the Delaware Valley a chance to be actively engaged and to make a difference in their own lives and in their communities.

Warm regards,
William J. Marrazzo
President and Chief Executive Officer