Like most people, I’ve been spending the past few weeks enjoying the holiday season with family and friends and thinking about plans for 2025 – both personal and professional.
I’ll spare you details about my personal plans, but they involve weight loss and learning a new language, and they’re carryovers from 2024, 2023, 2022 … I’m sure you get the idea.
I will, however, share details about plans we have in the Content Department of Ideastream Public Media for 2025.
In Cleveland, our news team will be reporting on the mayoral election and City Council ward redistricting, and the races to fill those seats. We are also looking into how uncertainty about access to abortion is affecting the way people -- particularly women -- make family planning decisions. Some local women who face high-risk pregnancies say they plan to delay getting pregnant until they're more confident that abortion would be among their health care options should it be needed.
We will continue to investigate progress or the lack thereof of police oversight in Cleveland. Our coverage will expand in 2025 as the city attempts to meet the consent decree requirements on discipline and promotions. And in early 2025 we will be premiering season two of our award-winning podcast “Living For We,” which examines the physical and mental health impacts of racism as a public health crisis. This new season will focus on gun violence, an issue that disproportionately impacts youth and adults of color.
In Akron, the police department is drawing increased scrutiny over its policies around use of force. We will continue to cover the ongoing investigation and fallout from the shooting of 15-year-old Jazmir Tucker, as well as the decision by the city administration to bring in national consultants to examine use of force.
The decision to relocate a waste transfer station in East Akron is highlighting ongoing issues of environmental inequities. We will dig into whether the relocation solves the issue or simply shifts it.
For many years, we have broadcast the monthly Akron Roundtable Signature Speaker series on WKSU and now, through a first-of-its-kind collaboration, we will be bringing the speaker series to television. Ideastream is partnering with the Akron Roundtable, PBS Western Reserve and the University of Akron to record and broadcast the monthly speaker series beginning later this month on both WVIZ/PBS and on PBS Western Reserve. We are excited that students at the University of Akron will be playing an integral role in the production of this series.
In Canton, we’ll be following the story of Frank Tyson, who died last April in police custody while handcuffed during an arrest. His death garnered national headlines, and the officers involved have been indicted.
NewsDepth, the Emmy award-winning statewide weekly television news program for students in grades 4-6, embarks on an exciting new experiment in 2025. Thanks to funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, two other Ohio Public TV stations in Ohio, one in Athens and another in Cincinnati, will join Ideastream to produce content for the show. This two-year expansion project will give NewsDepth fans more news from around the state, which is something teachers and students have been requesting for several years. And if I’m being honest, I’m thrilled about that, too. We aim NewsDepth at middle schoolers, but the content is so compelling I watch and learn something every week. You should give it a try!
Our arts and culture team is working with producers at other public media stations throughout Ohio on a project that will give you a glimpse behind the curtain of art creation. A video series called “Behind the Scenes - Art Across Ohio” will air on our weekly television program Applause. Topics we'll delve into include choreography, staging theater productions, curating exhibits and building guitars.
The Sound of Us, an initiative of our engaged journalism efforts, trains folks to report, write and produce their own radio stories. Later this month, you will hear five storytellers from Cleveland’s Clark-Fulton neighborhood. Their stories range from an informative but lighthearted take on the prevalence of diabetes in the Hispanic/Latino community to a snapshot of a kids’ theater production featuring Puerto Rican bomba music. You can hear the stories beginning January 21st on WKSU during Morning Edition and All Things Considered. And a Sound of Ideas Community Tour featuring some of those storytellers, along with a discussion and celebration of local Hispanic and Latino culture, is in the works for early February.
And there’s so much more: our podcasts Shuffle and The View from Pluto, Applause Performances, our weekly City Club of Cleveland broadcasts or the steady stream of stories from our Statehouse News Bureau and The Ohio Newsroom, not to mention comprehensive and contextual reporting on our web site, ideastream.org, on radio and television, on all of our social media channels and in our daily and weekly newsletters.
Our motto here at Ideastream Public Media is “We Take You There” and as you can see, we take that very seriously, with a ton of planning. And our planning for 2025 will continue throughout the year, so I invite you to participate. If you have an idea to share, please use the contact form on our website. Thank you for listening, watching, reading, streaming and supporting Ideastream Public Media.
Meanwhile, Happy New Year and wish me luck on my personal plan to lose a few pounds and gain a few more French vocabulary words. I’m not sure the second goal is helping the first, though, as I’ve learned to say “S’il te plaît, passe-moi les macarons.” That translates to, “please pass me the macarons.”
Oh well, c’est la vie.
"The Cut" is featured in Ideastream Public Media's weekly newsletter, The Frequency Week in Review. To get The Frequency Week in Review, The Daily Frequency or any of our newsletters, sign up on Ideastream's newsletter subscription page.
