We had a jam-packed day yesterday during our visit to WILL in Champaign. We went in with a few ideas of who we would meet and left with a very good understanding of what WILL is as a station and what its goals are moving forward. We started our tour of the facilities with Sean Powers around 9:30 a.m. and the tour turned into back-to-back meetings with staff members ranging from community engagement editors to TV directors to the WILL Connect editor. It was tiring, but we were so happy to get a grasp of the station’s strengths, weaknesses and ideas to grow and better communicate with its audience.
A few common themes that came up as we met with these journalists, editors and directors yesterday were: the desire to expand its online presence, better communicate with/help the community, freshening online content and archiving it effectively, incorporating user-generated content onto WILL sites, building community engagement, etc. Some of the challenges the station has are pretty common in the public media world – it has only so much staff and money to work with, as well as a bit of a learning curve when it comes to multimedia and web design.
The WILL Connect site we saw yesterday looks crisp and very impressive, but the station is still tweaking and improving it. One of the WILL staff members described the WILL Connect site as “a graphic representation of connecting”. Celeste, the editor of WILL Connect, also summed up the importance of the site by sharing with us one audience member’s view. A woman told Celeste that “I used to listen to WILL, but now I know WILL listens to us.” WILL Connect’s goal is to share stories, projects and resources with the community to make it better and help solve some of its problems.
Overall, the day was a big success. These meetings were a fabulous opportunity to bounce ideas around with different staff members and explain what we’ve learned from Intersection and other RJI/KBIA programs. WILL seemed very grateful that we were able to come visit as well. We even learned a few tips and tricks about video archiving from WILL that might help Intersection too.
Looking ahead to the next few weeks, we’re going to talk with WILL again at the beginning of the week to figure out what exactly we need to present to it on April 20th. (For example, are we physically going there to train them, or is this going to be a web-based conversation/training?) We also invited Sean to come observe a few of the live Intersection community events coming up this month.
