The IowaWatch Connection radio report, part of a statewide audience engagement program, premiered July 5-6, 2014, as a 13-week experiment that would spread reporting by IowaWatch.org to a statewide radio audience. Two-hundred programs had been produced as of the weekend of April 27-29, 2018.
This is a podcast of the 200th program. It revisits two stories that took top honors in the recent Iowa Broadcast News Association awards contest:
- First place: Farm and Business reporting, for a report on foreign farmland ownership in the Midwest that featured a Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting story on that topic.
- First place: General Reporting, for a report on Iowa’s capacity for future rail traffic.
The IowaWatch Connection airs on 19 radio stations covering Iowa, reaching listeners across the state and parts of Iowa’s seven neighboring states. Additionally, an Illinois high school station, WLTL-FM, airs the program during the school year as a teaching tool for students and to help fulfill its public service responsibility.