Photo by Cory W. MacNeil
Aug. 7, 2025
KBIA-FM, the University of Missouri School of Journalism’s NPR-member radio station, has won a first-place national award from the Public Media Journalists Association Awards.
The station won in the Series category for “The Next Harvest,” which covered the environmental and economic challenges facing the Midwest’s agriculture industry over the course of seven episodes (a second season of episodes will air this fall). The awards competition pitted KBIA against public media outlets of similar size nationwide.
“This award honors community-centered reporting that matters to mid-Missourians, which is at the heart of KBIA’s mission,” David Kurpius, dean of the Missouri School of Journalism, said. “It’s great to see that work — on a topic that resonates locally but has impacts nationwide — recognized on a national scale.”
It’s the second major award for the series after a regional Edward R. Murrow Award in the News Series category, with the further potential for a national Murrow Award when those honors are announced in August.
The series was reported and produced by Jana Rose Schleis, one of several staff members at the station who both create their own content and help students perform hands-on reporting as part of the Missouri Method of learning by doing. Schleis joined KBIA last year as a news producer after earning her master’s degree from the school in 2023.
Having grown up on a dairy farm in Wisconsin, she brought a passion to the story that encouraged it to grow from a single planned installment to a series examining the many factors affecting Midwestern agriculture.
“Reporting and producing The Next Harvest was a fantastic experience,” Schleis said. “The work took me all over the state of Missouri and beyond to hear from farmers, scientists, researchers and advocates working on ways to make agriculture more resilient — ecologically and economically.”
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