Carolina Connection is the radio newsmagazine produced by students in the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill Hussman School of Journalism and Media.
Students are responsible for all aspects of the program’s production. They report, write, produce, and anchor each week’s program. They also perform all of the technical tasks, such as recording interviews, mixing audio, and engineering the weekly live half-hour broadcast.
Carolina Connection is heard Saturday mornings at 8:30 on WCHL 97.9 FM and 1360 AM — Chapel Hill’s news/talk radio station. Selected stories are broadcast statewide on public radio station WUNC-FM and the North Carolina News Network. Student-produced stories from Carolina Connection also have aired nationwide on National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered,”on the BBC, and on American Public Media’s “The Story with Dick Gordon.”
The program is available online at www.carolinaconnection.org and on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and other podcast platforms.
Carolina Connection has won virtually every major award for student radio. In both 2017 and 2018, it won the national Edward R. Murrow collegiate award for “Excellence in Audio Newscast.” Five times, it was named the nation’s most outstanding student newscast by the Society of Professional Journalists. It has won multiple honors from such groups as the the Broadcast Education Association and National Broadcasting Society. In each of the past six years, a student from the “Carolina Connection” team has been among the five national radio finalists in the Hearst Journalism Awards, considered the “Pulitzer Prizes” of college journalism.
