KUAF Reports Available on CD

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — University of Arkansas radio station KUAF 91.3 FM has completed a two-year “public journalism” project, and the finished product is a CD collection of stories titled “Arkansas Cultural Tableaux.”

The stories were originally broadcast on both KUAF’s award-winning news magazine, “Ozarks at Large,” and on National Public Radio. The stories were produced by Jacqueline Froelich, a KUAF reporter and NPR correspondent. The CD contains stories about:

• Immigrant Marshall Islanders and their complex nuclear legacy.

• The struggles of Muslim women inside a local Islamic mosque.

• An Ozarks Holocaust survivor who fought in the Jewish underground.

• The history of Japanese-American concentration camps in Arkansas.

• Members of the Cherokee Nation in Tahlequah as they seek to reclaim their lost language.

• Fort Smith’s Vietnamese refugees 30 years after they were evacuated during the “Fall of Saigon.”

• A local resident who is a member of the deaf community.

     The “Arkansas Cultural Tableaux” project was funded by a grant from the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation, and was part of a two-year multi-media public interest radio news series and public television documentary.

The Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation’s mission is to improve the lives of Arkansans by funding programs and projects that improve education, economic justice as well as racial and social justice.

The content for the stories in “Arkansas Cultural Tableaux” was determined in part by a carefully selected cross-cultural focus group comprising public radio listeners and public television viewers from west and northwest Arkansas. KUAF gets listeners involved early in programming partnerships, a practice that has gained the station national recognition. Known as "public journalism,” such media ventures work to provide more meaningful public interest news coverage.

KUAF's news department collaborated with Emmy-award-winning public television producer Dale Carpenter, who is also a University of Arkansas journalism professor. Carpenter is completing an hour-long public television documentary on the Ozark Marshall Islander community, to be released this May.

KUAF is mailing “Arkansas Cultural Tableaux” CDs free of charge to public library archives around the state. The audio has also been posted on the station’s Web site at http://www.kuaf.com.