Editor’s note: 2024 marked an exceptional year of storytelling at WHYY News

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Dear WHYY News audience,

The past year brought economic challenges to the news industry and foreshadowed artificial intelligence changes that will impact future news publishing. While the media landscape continues to evolve, your local public media news team focused on serving you with timely storytelling in 2024.

What has remained constant at WHYY News is the chronicling of a range of storylines and news events across the Greater Philadelphia region, Delaware and South Jersey. Our accomplishments, as a collaborative cohort, are rooted in the public service mission we uphold each day. Meet the WHYY News staff, community team and audio programming staff here.

The first day of January 2024 started off as a bustling day in the WHYY newsroom as WHYY News broke the news that Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker was sworn in in a private ceremony, hours before the official inauguration ceremony. From there, news staff kept pace with an unrelenting news cycle to keep our audience informed.

Let’s take a look back at some of our 2024 stories that resonated with our audiences and generated impact for our communities.

• Cris Barrish: Delaware budget director arrested for serial petty thefts and Report finds Del. Lt. Gov. Bethany Hall-Long’s campaign reports broke the law
• P. Kenneth Burns: Embattled Camden school advisory board president resists calls to step down and Lawnside community holds vigil to shine light on love in the face of hate incident
• Heather Chin: New Chinatown supermarket mixes nostalgia with the latest pop culture fun and Billy Penn’s most read stories in 2024
• Kenny Cooper: Is the American shopping mall dead? and Philadelphia is ‘America’s poorest big city.’ Here’s what that actually means
• Peter Crimmins: So beautiful but so terrible: Academy of Natural Sciences traces the ecology of fashion and A gnome in FDR Park will speak for the trees
• Amanda Fitzpatrick: Philly teacher’s student loan forgiveness tops $185k as others struggle with their debt and Sen. Casey, state and county officials discuss Black maternal health at Philly campaign stop
• Sandra Jones: Pennsylvania scores high for police misconduct cases
• Nick Kariuki: Dave, a West Philly hero, buys a billboard to find a date
• Tom MacDonald: Philadelphia City Council sends school board choice back to mayor, who appoints her anyway, and Mayor Parker signs bills targeting quality of life in Kensington
• David Matthau: A South Jersey county is asking artists to create trolls made from recycled materials and how to get a REAL ID in New Jersey
• Kristen Mosbrucker-Garza: Philadelphia’s workforce is more educated than ever, but poverty divide lingers and Who should get the $63M endowment money of UArts?
• Aaron Moselle: 76ers stadium was approved by City Council amid pushback and ‘This is power’: Philly renters demand better living conditions from Odin Properties
• Sarah Mueller: Raw milk could save Delaware’s dairy industry. But the risks can be life-threatening
• Emily Neil: Calls grow for Bill Formica’s resignation at tense Souderton school board meeting and Project Libertad supports immigrant youth in suburban Philly schools
• Johnny Perez-Gonzalez: Wayward bear’s journey across northern Delaware ends after car strike and Leveling up: University of Delaware graduates its first class of gaming majors
• Susan Phillips: Top 2024 climate stories: N.J. wildfires, fracking fact checks
• Zoë Read: Rutgers researchers are exploring the impact of microplastics on the digestive system
• Meir Rinde: Removal of homeless encampments in Kensington caused a stir and mixed reactions
• Carmen Russell-Sluchansky: Former President Donald Trump was re-elected and WHYY News chronicled Vice President Kamala Harris’ run for U.S. president
• Sophia Schmidt: PGW gets federal money to replace aging gas mains in Philly
• Cory Sharber: A survivor’s tale: Mike Africa Jr.’s ‘On a Move’ tells the story of the MOVE bombing and Penn bans encampments while citing ‘commitment to open expression’
• Liz Tung: Saving Philly’s bats, one DIY condo at a time
• Stephen Williams: Pa. Gov. Shapiro’s higher education reforms come at a critical time, with declining enrollment and underfunding
• Alan Yu: Did Philadelphia’s soda tax have an impact on people’s health?
• Emma Lee, Kimberly Paynter and reporting staff: 2024 Photography in Review

The WHYY News reporting staff consists of just 21 daily news reporters, two visual journalists and two national radio show reporters. What we accomplish publishing each week is impressive as the WHYY News staff covers tremendous ground in our news coverage of the fourth-largest media market encompassing Greater Philadelphia, Delaware and South Jersey. We make impactful storytelling decisions each day to maximize our resources.

“The Pulse,” our newsroom’s weekly radio programming featuring health and science journalism, has grown to being aired on more than 125 radio stations and we’ve picked up our first international station in Paris. This is a huge accomplishment after 10 years of production and remarkable growth year over year.  We also celebrated Billy Penn’s 10th year of publishing with a community celebration and brought back The Billies Awards. PlanPhilly continues to chronicle the built environment and staffers documented developments with the Market East 76ers stadium proposal and its impact on Chinatown.

The 2024 national election season was historic. Both candidates for national office visited the Philadelphia region and the swing state of Pennsylvania at unprecedented frequency. WHYY News prioritized politics and approached coverage as a newsroom-wide, team effort. We pulled in all resources to ensure comprehensive coverage. The Swing, a pop-up politics newsletter, was created to chronicle campaign happenings. The night before Vice President Kamala Harris announced her running mate, the WHYY News team produced a timely one-hour radio special, “VP candidate watch: Pa. Gov. Josh Shapiro’s impact in Pa. and beyond,” as speculation grew that he might be picked for the role.

Seven weeks before Election Day, WHYY News staff contributed to the production of a National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) conversation with Vice President Kamala Harris hosted at WHYY headquarters. NABJ hosted a conversation with President Donald Trump earlier in the election season. WHYY News worked quickly to serve audiences on the day of the assassination attempt on Trump’s life in western Pennsylvania by providing immediate live updates on the radio and across digital platforms.

On Election Day, we again set up an elections headquarters in the newsroom and assigned staff to report across Philadelphia and its suburbs, Delaware and South Jersey. The team documented the historic wins of President Donald Trump, Lisa Blunt Rochester and Andy Kim (Democratic Senate candidates), and Sarah McBride (Democratic Congressional candidate). The WHYY News team produced a live radio show on election night to keep audiences informed and up to date on dispatches from both Republican and Democratic headquarters across the region. Listen to the show here.

WHYY News was again recognized with more than 40 journalism awards in 2024 for its explanatory and investigative journalism, including national and regional Murrow Awards as well as Keystone Media Awards. We were named the 2024 Outstanding News Operation in large market radio by the Keystones. Our dogged reporting work is fueled by remarkable teams of digital journalists, audio editors and news editors. The folks behind the scenes make our work possible and they are the unseen heroes of our daily journalism and newscast production, as well as our community and engagement work. They are Al Banks, Jamila Bey, Bobbi Booker, Madhu Bora, Brisa Luzzi Castro, Evan Croen, Anthony Cuffie, Mary Cummings-Jordan, Nichole Currie, Phil Davis, Dillon Dodson, Kevin Donahue, Mark Eichmann, Sarah Glover, Cherri Gregg, Joan Isabella, Charlie Kaier, Abbey Lamb, Lindsay Lazarksi, Jennifer Lynn, Amaris Manning, Eric Marsh Sr., Diana Martinez, Kevin McCorry, Josh Mellman, Eric Nixon, Maria Pulcinella, Maiken Scott, Rushawn Stanley, Alan Tu, John Weber, Caleb Wilkerson and Avi Wolfman-Arent.

Beyond the daily news grind, the newsroom expanded staff skills via the ongoing storytelling training series and a PBS climate grant, which highlighted Senior Reporter/Editor Susan Phillips’ climate and environmental storytelling in video format. Check out the Climate Fixers video series here.

The news management team partook in four manager retreats and the newsroom participated in team building exercises, such as mini-golf, a Franklin Square merry-go-round ride and potlucks. We plan to get back to bowling in 2025 and add wellness activities.

Looking ahead, the WHYY News staff will expand explanatory storytelling, develop digital products for Billy Penn, deepen our relationship with our News and Information Community Exchange (N.I.C.E.) partners, and continue Bridging Blocks exercises at local public squares such as libraries, schools and senior centers. In 2024 alone, WHYY News hosted more than 50 in-person civic dialogue events, and we are working to repeat the Civic News Summit and Black Men in Media Summit in 2025. We are excited to be working on numerous projects and are diving into our Every Voice, Every Vote reporting project work as well as expanding our Corporation for Public Broadcasting project in Delaware and a new series on the impact of creativity fueling success outcomes for youth. Stay tuned for more developing news special projects in 2025.

Despite significant economic, technological and industry influences adversely impacting  the business of news, local journalists exercise daily dedication to meeting the information needs of their local communities. WHYY is a vital independent news and information source for more than a million people across multiple platforms each week. WHYY celebrates 70 years of serving the public. Consider supporting WHYY and its independent newsroom.

The exercise of looking back while planning ahead for future team success at the end of each calendar year is rewarding. And now I turn to you. Our newsroom appreciates hearing from our audience, as it’s a part of our practice to listen and your feedback shapes our reporting on the issues important to our communities. As WHYY News continues to center the local communities we serve, please share your story ideas and input with us on our news feedback form below. We are working in service to you. Thank you for your support of WHYY. We are proud of our independent journalism that is made possible thanks to our audience and supporters.

Cheers to 2025!

Yours in Service,

Sarah Glover
WHYY VP of News & Civic Dialogue