WPLN podcast “The Promise,” wins Peabody Award in its second season.

“A Peabody Award-winning series about inequality and the people trying to rise above it, with host and reporter Meribah Knight. In Season 1, we told the store of Nashville’s largest public housing complex, smack in the middle of the city on the rise. In Season 2, we explore how that divide reveals itself in the classroom. One neighborhood, two schools – one black and poor, the other white and well-off, and the kids stuck in the middle.”

The Peabody Awards are based at the University of Georgia. Sixty nominees were announced in May 2021, chosen by unanimous vote of 19 jurors from more than 1,300 entries from television, podcasts/radio and the web in entertainment, news, documentary, arts, children’s/youth, public service and multimedia programming. https://wpln.org/post/the-promise-podcast-wins-peabody-award/

This story was reported over nearly two years. Meribah Knight immersed herself in the neighborhood and in Warner Elementary, the school featured in this season. She gathered more than 300 hours of tape, conducted more than 60 interviews, filed numerous public records requests, and traveled to the National Archives in Morrow, Ga., to sift through thousands of pages of court documents from Nashville’s 43-year court battle over school desegregation.

Meribah also spoke with dozens of parents, education policy experts, historians, legal scholars and those on the front lines of Nashville’s fight over school integration — past and present. When speaking with children, she always contacted parents, had release forms signed, and made sure staff and families inside school buildings knew exactly what she was doing and why she was there. In total, Meribah spent a full year reporting inside Warner Elementary and alongside its staff, from May of 2019 until May 2020, as the school grappled with Covid-19.

https://wpln.org/programs/the-promise/ 

https://wpln.org/post/the-promise-podcast-wins-peabody-award/ 

https://wpln.org/the-promise-why-we-are-making-this-podcast-and-how-we-reported-it/