Smile Healthy! Wins Regional Award

Thursday, April 1, 2004

WILL-AM’s Smile Healthy series about dental health and the lack of access to dental care won a 2004 regional Edward R. Murrow Award for excellence in electronic journalism from the Radio-Television News Directors Association.

The entire WILL-AM news staff of Tom Rogers, Dave Dickey, Jim Meadows and Ali Kawa produced stories for the series, as did reporter Lynn Crandall and WBCP announcer Ivon Ridgeway, who were brought onto the project through a grant from Sound Partners for Community Health.

WILL’s Kimberlie Kranich coordinated the Smile Healthy project, along with Ray Coates of WBCP and Claudia Lennhoff of Champaign County Health Care Consumers.

Regional winners become eligible for the national awards competition, which will be judged in early June.

The grant from Sound Partners, a national project of the Benton Foundation funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, funded the project in which WILL-AM partnered with WBCP-AM and Champaign County Health Care Consumers to report on the dental care access problem and to encourage citizen action in the community to improve the situation.

Smile Healthy is a collaboration between WILL-AM 580, WBCP-AM 1580 and Champaign County Health Care Consumers. Smile Healthy is underwritten by Sound Partners for Community Health - a program of the Benton Foundation, funded by The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which is dedicated to improving health and health care for all Americans.

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