Sparking Connections
Covering the COVID-19 Pandemic
Since early 2020, NHPR has provided critical information on COVID-19 to help people in the Granite State make informed decisions about their health and safety. NHPR has also shined a light on the way the pandemic affects the everyday lives of people and families in New Hampshire.
During fiscal year 2020-21, we published more than a thousand local COVID-19 related pieces, including news stories, shows on The Exchange, data infographics and maps, blog posts and interviews with experts and the general public in order to meet the urgent public need for information.
This coverage has been viewed more than 9.3 million times since March 1, 2020, including 4.9 million pageviews for the live blog. We’ve produced more than 1,000 blog posts since March 2020. In May, NHPR was awarded a regional Edward R. Murrow Award for Digital Journalism, recognizing our web presence, multimedia content (broadcast, digital and social media) and digital approach to stories.
The podcast art for “Windfall,” the series released by Outside/In in July. Graphic by Sara Plourde.
Outside/In
NHPR’s award-winning podcast Outside/In, about the natural world and how we use it, continues to engage audiences in New Hampshire, across the nation and around the world.
The podcast was downloaded on average more than 98,000 times a month during the fiscal year and 6 million times since its launch. In the past year, Outside/In has released a number of notable episodes including The Acorn: An Ohlone Love Story and Gingko Love.
The Outside/In team ended the fiscal year with the June 2021 launch of “Windfall.” This series focused on the establishment of an offshore wind industry in New England — the politics, the science, the environmental impact and the human stories behind it.
Civics 101
At the invitation of the Annenberg Public Policy Center in spring 2021, NHPR’s Civics 101 podcast joined the Civics Renewal Project. The project is dedicated to “strengthening civic life in the U.S. by increasing the quality of civics education in our nation’s schools and by improving accessibility to high-quality, no-cost learning materials.” Civics 101 also launched a six-part series on Supreme Court cases dealing with issues of civil rights, including Dred Scott v Sanford and Plessy v Ferguson.
Iriana Lopez (center) reads to Steven Koehler (left) and other students in the Summer Learning Academy, a subject of NHPR’s COVID and the Classroom series. Photo by Sarah Gibson.
COVID and the Classroom
NHPR launched COVID and the Classroom to provide a home for our critical education reporting amid the uncertainties of the pandemic. In November 2020, the school situation comprised a patchwork of situations across the state — with some students attending fully in person, some in hybrid learning, and others fully remote.
Over the next seven months, we produced dozens of news stories, features, broadcast interviews and talk shows. The reporting captured the challenging decisions of school leaders, parents and students, and the impact of those decisions, which we’re continuing to cover today.
Banner photo: A statue of Gov. John Winant outside the New Hampshire State Library dons a paper mask. Photo by Dan Barrick.