Broadcast Students Continue To Excel

By Danny Bobbe
J-School Web Reporter

Broadcast students in the University of Montana’s School of Journalism will make an impressive showing at this year’s Broadcast Education Association Festival of Media Arts held April 18 to 21 in Las Vegas.

Amber Bushnell, Heather Hintze and Cortney Fawthrop earned top honors in the Student Video-Mixed/Other category for their video report on a small business in Townsend, Mont., that explored the world of hand-blown glass. The project aired as part of a Montana PBS television series called “Business: Made in Montana.”

Their story, “Goose Bay Glass,” revealed to viewers the process behind making intricate pieces of glass. Along with telling the story of a small-town couple who moved their business from a garage to a store in downtown Townsend, the seven-minute project was visually pleasing with its footage of red-hot glass, Fawthrop said.

Bushnell

Fawthrop

Hintze

Overcast

photos by Will Moss

Another BEA winner is Melanie Overcast who, along with winning first-place awards in two separate radio categories, has won the Best of Festival Award.

Earlier this year Overcast also won first place in the Hearst Journalism Awards Program radio competition. The stories that earned her top awards at the BEA were about a U.S. Marine from Montana killed in Iraq and a pornography store located across the street from a church.

“I thought the bar was set pretty high last year when Stan Pillman won first place in Hearst and was a finalist in BEA, but Melanie managed to top that,” said Denise Dowling, assistant professor in the Radio-Television Department.

The trick to telling a good story is not only finding people who can personify the issue, Overcast said, but finding a topic that you, as the reporter, are interested in.

Lately Overcast has been working on a story about the decline in availability of classes for gifted students. Much emphasis has been placed on special education and remedial courses – especially in light of the No Child Left Behind Act – and Overcast is looking into whether gifted students are being attended to as well.

Although Overcast will accept her award in Las Vegas, she is not worried about spending the $1,000 in prize money on a casino table.

“I’m not old enough to play black-jack, which is unfortunate,” said Overcast, who has already spent a lot of time in Nevada and will try to visit her grandmother during the trip.

Another UM journalism student who fared well in the BEA competition was Matt Sampson, who worked with Hintze on a project about steamroller prints that won third place in the TV Feature category.

The BEA is a professional association for professors, industry professionals and graduate students interested in teaching and research about electronic media and multimedia enterprises, according to the group’s Web site.

The work entered in this competition, Dowling said, is “the best of the best.”

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