Partnerships, project-based reporting and community service are among the competitive advantages public-radio news operations offer at the local level, news and program directors noted in our recent webinar on Changing Public Radio.

The combination of local news staff and D.C.-based National Public Radio foreign correspondents (who now outnumber those of CNN) makes for among the best news staff in the country. But that combination has challenges of its own, such as figuring out how the national and local organizations can work together.

“NPR gives us such a journalistic firepower that it is hard to match,” said Jerome Vaughn, news director of Detroit Public Radio. “Before, our competitors were basically the other stations here in Detroit. But with the Web, now we’ve got to think of NPR in some ways as a partial competitor for funding. There’s been a lot of discussion about that and hopefully that’ll come to some completely beneficial conclusion.”

Tamar Charney of Michigan Public Radio pointed out that national and local news staffs are finding new ways to work together: “NPR has been changing its attitude a little bit. It used to be they did their own thing in Washington and we did our own thing but with new management in the past year they have a new attitude.… Just yesterday with the asian carp summit we were going to send somebody in but with the weather we couldn’t possibly get there. NPR actually sent somebody to the White House to make sure we got the tape.”

Pitching public radio makes good sense because of the emphasis on local news and connections to the community at public radio, said Vaughn, Charney, and the other two participants, Steve Edwards of Chicago Public Radio and Bill Wheelhouse of WUIS in Springfield, Ill. (Thom Clark of the Workshop moderated).

“Public radio stations are trying to become local in a different way,” Wheelhouse said. “Everyone’s thinking about, ‘how can we serve the community?’ Community service is becoming important because, one, nearly every other station in town does not have the quality of news that we do and two, isn’t locally owned. … I think that is how public radio is going to keep itself relevant on a local level.”

Steve Edwards noted about a half dozen different initiatives at WBEZ/Chicago Public Radio to reach out into the community, such as establishing the bureaus in Northwest Indiana, Humboldt Park and Englewood and a new fourth bureau in West Rogers Park. When funding becomes available, he added, they hope to expand to the collar counties in the future.

The full transcript is set to be available at the Workshop’s WBEZ Chicago Amplified feed shortly.