Utah Public Radio Captures Top Utah Broadcasters Association Awards

Journalists of Utah Public Radio, a service of Utah State University, were among top honorees at the Utah Broadcasters Association’s 2011UBEE Awards dinner held Sept. 29 in Salt Lake City.

Storee Powell ’11 received a Gold award for “Best Single Event News Coverage.” Mary-Ann Muffoletto MA’95 and Kathryn Hopkins Peterson MS’11 were honored with a Gold award for “Best Feature Story or Program.”

Powell, a recent graduate of USU’s Department of Journalism and Communication who is now employed with the university’s Center for Persons with Disabilities, received an award for “Circle the Wagons,” a story of one woman’s struggle to find a greater purpose after her husband was killed in Salt Lake City’s Trolley Square shootings in 2007.

“In radio, I love that people have to listen to the whole broadcast to get the whole story,” Powell told a reporter last year. “I can get people involved, listening intently and, in a world that runs on ‘fast’ all the time, that is a great thing.”

Powell produced the story with mentor Kerry Bringhurst, UPR news director for UPR, during Powell’s student internship with the news station.

Muffoletto and Peterson received an award for the feature story “Houston, We Have a Solution.” Muffoletto accompanied USU’s Get Away Special student space research team to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in June 2010. She wrote and narrated the story, which chronicles the team’s efforts to conduct an experiment in microgravity aboard NASA’s ‘Vomit Comet’ aircraft. Peterson, who interned at UPR during the 2010-11 academic year, produced the story.

“I’m grateful to the USU GAS Team for inviting me to accompany them on this adventure and to Utah Public Radio, which granted me a free-lance assignment to do the story, a NASA requirement for my microgravity flight,” says Muffoletto, public relations specialist for USU’s College of Science. “It was an incredible opportunity.”

Peterson says selecting music to accompany the story was a challenge because “I wanted it to be fun and science-y but not cheesy.”

“I never met any of the students Mary-Ann interviewed for the story, so it was fun getting to know them through sounds,” she says. “It was a little difficult listening to parts where students described throwing up again and again due to motion sickness on the plane. It’s a good thing I have a strong stomach.”

Peterson, who now resides in Upland, Calif., designs and implements training for electronic medical record software at Loma Linda University Health Care.

Muffoletto praised UPR staff for their assistance with the project.

“Kerry Bringhurst, Friend Weller and Shalayne Smith Needham provided invaluable advice and assistance,” she says. “I’d never recorded audio for radio before — much less in microgravity.”

Utah Public Radio is Utah’s oldest non-commercial, educational radio service and is heard by listeners across Utah and southern Idaho via a network of five full-power HD-enhanced stations and 30 translators. More than half of the Utah’s population resides within the station and translator network coverage area.

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