We have won a number of awards here at WOSH during my nearly 18-years at the station. Many are for News Coverage. Some are for Best Newscast. And My Two Cents has won a number for Best Editorial Commentary. But this weekend, we picked up an award of which I can say I am the most proud.
The Wisconsin Broadcasters Association honored WOSH with an award in the Best Significant Community Impact category for our program “Community Connection”. If you are not familiar, “Community Connection” is our monthly visit with Tracey Robertson of FIT Oshkosh–featuring issues affecting Oshkosh’s minority population. The show stemmed from an introspective look at the programming we have been providing on WOSH. To say that that voices heard on our station are predominantly white and male are an understatement. And while that may represent our core audience–it is not representative of our community as a whole.
Unfortunately, the majority of the time you hear the names of people of color on our station it’s part of a story on crime. We certainly don’t identify people racially here on the radio–but names are commonly a dead giveaway. Sometimes, you might hear a Black or Hispanic voice in a non-crime news story–but then it’s usually tied to something about low-income families or fear of immigration enforcement. It’s not often that we feature people of color in stories about business, education or community development.
The episode of “Community Connection” that we submitted for this WBA award featured an African-American woman, a gay man, and Hmong woman. That’s likely not the group of folks you share drinks with before your Friday Fish Fry dinner–but they are the people who are increasingly making up the population of Oshkosh. The topic was the “Color Brave” photo exhibit now on display at the Paine Arts Center featuring the growing number of black and brown faces in our city–and is certainly worth checking out.
I’m incredibly proud of this award–Best Significant Community Impact–because quite honestly, doing good news stories or calling a good game of basketball or providing insightful commentary every morning is just a small part of what we do here at WOSH. But impacting our community–for the better–gets to the heart of what being a local radio station should be all about.
