Monday, Dec. 9, St. Louis Public Radio and the St. Louis Beacon merged. This milestone marks the end of more than a year of effort. But in a sense, we’ve just broken ground for the news organization we intend to build.
Its foundation is constructed from solid principles. We believe that facts matter. We believe that fairness matters. We believe that if we pay attention to facts and fairness, then our work will matter to you and the future of our region.
We also understand that the world has changed. People get news, share it and discuss it in all sorts of ways – traditional broadcast and print, of course, but also online, in person and through ever-expanding forms of social media. We want to get better at listening to, learning from and informing this new world.
Margaret Wolf Freivogel is the editor of St. Louis Public Radio and The Beacon, a service of UMSL. (St. Louis Beacon file photo)
You can already see our new organization begin to take shape. As one small example of how we intend to work, we are kicking off a series of stories that focus on little-known problem solvers in our region. Today, the spotlight is on Michael Palmer, who’s developed a program to teach kids how to write code. Soon, you’ll be hearing about a pint-sized pundit, a medical worker and college students who are helping to feed their neighbors.
Over time, our work will take many forms. With a newsroom of more than two dozen, we’ll have more reporters on air and online. We’ll be able to provide more of the story behind the stories. And we’ll be finding more ways to make complex topics understandable and to share the experience and expertise of our region.
While our work will vary in form, certain commitments will hold true – to connect with you by whatever means you find most useful and convenient; to dig beneath the surface of the news and look for connections among disparate developments; to explore our region’s underlying problems and opportunities and how people are addressing them. At a time when all of us are inundated with a digital flood of infobits, we will search for clarity amidst chaos. At a time when opinions and ideologies grab the limelight, we will examine the world with the light of many perspectives.
The St. Louis region is working to reinvent itself to meet the economic, social, political and cultural challenges we face. Our new organization is reinventing itself, too. Please join with us as we work to illuminate, investigate, challenge and celebrate the developments and issues that matter to you and the future of the St. Louis region. Please join with us as we build.
Margaret Wolf Freivogel was the founding editor of the St. Louis Beacon, a nonprofit news organization, and is now the editor of St. Louis Public Radio and The Beacon, a service of the University of Missouri–St. Louis. A version of this post originally appeared on stlpublicradio.org. Visit Inside St. Louis Public Radio to read a blog post by Tim Eby, general manager of St. Louis Public Radio and The Beacon, to read more about the new organization.
