Dean Stone Night in the works for early April

By Alissa Herbaly Coons
J-School Web Reporter

It's that time of the year when the snow is melting and falling again, the squirrels don't know if they're in or out, and the J-School faculty is figuring out how to divvy up almost $85,000 in scholarships and awards at Dean Stone Night.

The annual J-School gala will start at 7:30 p.m. on April 3 with the Dean Stone Lecture. This year's topic is the "Decline and Fall of Television Broadcasting," presented by Av Westin, who has worked in broadcast for more than 50 years. Westin's speech will cover the history of broadcast from Edward R. Murrow to MSNBC.

"Essentially, it's my view that television news is rapidly decreasing in its ability to cover the news fairly and accurately," Westin said. "We are unlikely to see a return to the days when TV news was the principal supplier of news and information to the American public."

Av Westin

In the commercially driven world of news media, broadcasters are cutting their staffs, "substituting tabloids and titillation for information," Westin said, to the point where they can no longer provide fair and accurate news coverage.

"The bottom line has trumped the editorial line every single time," he said.

Westin started his career in 1949 as a reporter for CBS News, later was executive producer of ABC Evening News and eventually became a senior vice president at Time Warner. He developed and produced many news programs, including "Inside Edition," "20/20," "World News Tonight" and "Close-Up." As a Freedom Forum Fellow, he wrote a handbook on fairness and accuracy in broadcast news.

Westin directs the National Student Television project, an offshoot of the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Foundation. The project trains high school journalists around the country in good broadcast journalism practices. This year it will begin honoring outstanding work with a high school version of an Emmy award. Westin himself has won six Emmys, among many other awards.

Despite the sorry state of modern reporting, Westin said he is optimistic about his work with students.

"We don't give up," he said. "We don't want to give up."

The lecture will be held in the North Underground Lecture Hall and is free and open to the public.

Dean Stone festivities continue April 4 with the awards banquet, which begins at 5 p.m. at the Holiday Inn Parkside. Student tickets cost $15 and are subsidized by application fees to the professional program. All other tickets cost $20. Tickets will be available in the J-School office starting March 17.

Dean Stone Night has been a tradition since the 1950s, when Dean Nathaniel Blumberg decided to honor the memory of the first journalism dean with an awards banquet and a lecture by a visiting journalist. In those days there were very few scholarships, and the comments of the speaker were printed in the Montana Journalism Review. Since the first Dean Stone Night, the event has evolved from a dinner into a two-day extravaganza.

J-school alum and professor Carol Van Valkenburg, who has attended Dean Stone Night herself or sponsored a needy student to go to almost every banquet since the 1970s, explained the split: Having the lecture one night and the awards banquet the next night lets people hear lectures on pressing issues in journalism without having to buy a ticket to the banquet. It also keeps both events short enough to be enjoyable and to maintain their momentum.

One year in the early 1990s, the celebration became the Dean Stone Picnic, held one chilly spring day in Pattee Canyon, elderly first-time donors shivering their way through the awards.

"I don't know why we did that," Van Valkenburg said. "It was crazy."

In recent years, the banquet has been an evening of food and awards where students, faculty and scholarship donors mingle in a more elegant and relaxed setting, breaking from the usual classroom environment and everyday habits of the J-School.

It takes weeks to allocate the scholarships, and Van Valkenburg called it a "heart-wrenching experience" for the faculty.

"In the best of all worlds, we would give every deserving student an award every year," she said. "I think our students are really extraordinary."

The amount of scholarship money available has tumbled with the stock market in the past year, but several new scholarships should keep the total near $85,000, Van Valkenburg said.

"Our alums have been unusually generous," she said. "For the size of our school, they give more per capita than any other school on campus."

Yet there is only so much money to go around, and decision makers are often bound by the nature of the awards—the word scholarship implies that the recipient must not be graduating or leaving—and the sometimes particular wishes of donors.

"We have one scholarship that can only go to a student from Big Sandy," Van Valkenburg said.

Tiffany Aldinger, a print senior from Glendive who is the design editor for the Kaimin, won one of the larger scholarships given last year. She received the $4,800 Albert Erickson scholarship, established in honor of the 1931 UM graduate by his wife, Dorothy Erickson, to help a student who spells well and who wants to edit a Montana newspaper.

"It came as a really big surprise to me," Aldinger said.

When the award was announced, she had to check with her friends to make sure she had heard her own name. The scholarship has let her focus on her studies and work at the Kaimin this year instead of taking out student loans or getting an off-campus job to pay rent.

"It was a great feeling to be recognized by the J-School," Aldinger said.

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