Awards season for journalists is in the early stages, as organizations recognize the best work of the previous year. The Oklahoma Association of Broadcasters has announced its award winners, and KGOU is among them.

KGOU won the award for general news coverage of last year's extended and extreme drought. Congratulations to News Director Kurt Gwartney and our entire news department for their excellent reporting! We'll be adding this and any other awards KGOU receives this spring to our Awards page.

 

KGOU has just wrapped up the annual financial audit, performed by an independent auditing firm, for the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2011. FY2011 was a very good year for KGOU, as the station maintained sound financial footing while increasing public service.

Fundraising increased significantly, both in membership and underwriting. Other sources of funding, however, decreased; KGOU received less funding from the University of Oklahoma and also from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. You can see all the figures and management's assessment of KGOU's financial standing at KGOU.org.

 

Interminable interrogations, being detained with the threat of violence against herself and her subjects -- NPR's Beirut correspondent Kelly McEvers knows firsthand the dangers of reporting from a foreign country where journalism is not freely practiced. She tells Harvard University's Nieman Foundation about the rewards for such dangerous work in this journalist's profile.

 

Eclectic public radio music program World Café celebrated 20 years on the air last October, amassing interviews and musical performances from some 3000 musicians. To mark the anniversary, KGOU will broadcast the 13-episode World Café 20th Anniversary Special over the next 13 weeks in the Friday Night Live Headliner Showcase time slot.

Host David Dye goes back through the archives to revisit the show's most outstanding guests, the first time now-famous artists appeared on the show, and career retrospectives of legendary musicians. See the lineup and tune in Fridays at 11 p.m. for the musical memories.

 

In February, NPR's Backseat Book Club is reading The Hundred Dresses by Eleanor Estes and Louis Slobodkin and Shooting Kabul by N.H. Senzai, two stories about emigration and creating a home in a new place while still yearning for the one left behind.

In Shooting Kabul, a boy named Fadi finds his voice through photography. The book club is inviting young readers to share photos of the people and places they love in a special photo project. Get photography tips and instructions at NPR.org.

 

There are people who live long enough to create a link -- a one-generation link -- to historical figures from what feels like the distant past, and their presence among us shrinks history. "Long Ago" suddenly seems much closer because these people help us leap across space and time. Robert Krulwich explores these "human wormholes" in his blog Krulwich Wonders, one of the most recommended stories on NPR.org this week.