J-School alum returns to teach for semester

By Rachel Honrud
J-School Web Reporter

photo by Lizz Rauf

Laubach lectures about the origin of magazines in her Journalism 100 course.

A Montana J-School grad who has worked at television stations all over the state has returned to campus temporarily to fill the teaching position left vacant by the recent retirement of Bill Knowles.

Brandi Lynn Laubach, 32, was hired to teach this semester while the Radio-Television Department looked for a replacement for Knowles.  

“It’s a good experience for me to get a little bit more experience for me to go onto the next level of teaching,” Laubach said.

Before her recent entry into teaching, Laubach worked all over Montana in many areas of broadcast, including anchoring newscasts and being a producer. However, she said this isn’t actually the first time she has taught. 

Laubach said a lot of reporters at the news stations where she worked didn’t have the experience or writing skills needed to be successful. She taught them how to write scripts for the newscasts and realized she liked helping them, which sparked her interest in teaching.

Denise Dowling, an assistant R-TV professor, said she has seen Laubach’s passion for journalism and writing skills. “She’s a stickler for good writing,” Dowling said. 

One class Laubach is teaching is R-TV 280: Reporting for Broadcast, an introductory reporting class.

“She’s encouraging [the students] to be hard-nosed reporters,” Dowling said. “I think she’s encouraging but still being very demanding, which is exactly what we need there.”

Along with R-TV 280, Laubach is helping R-TV students who are covering the state Legislature and is teaching Journalism 100: Introduction to Mass Media, a class Bill Knowles taught for years.

“It’s strange taking over his class just because I went through his class,” Laubach said. “Nobody could ever replace him, ever.”

Laubach said she has added some video clips of her own to J100 lectures, but she hasn’t changed a whole lot. She said Knowles gave her some good advice for teaching the class. Also, since graduating from UM, Laubach said Knowles has overseen her broadcast career. 

“I’d call him my mentor,” she said. 

Laubach uses her own experiences to teach her students. “They all have that urgency to want to learn more,” she said. Students often ask her about how she got into broadcasting and what it’s really like to work in broadcasting.

In 2002, on the day she was moving from Great Falls to Billings to anchor a newscast, Laubach got a phone call and was told she had thyroid cancer. One week after starting work in Billings, Laubach had surgery, recuperated for a week, and then started anchoring the news again. “That week I was back, I don’t remember a lot of it,” she said. 

After this semester, Laubach hopes to find a full-time college teaching position. 

“She really took on a lot coming here, and she’s handled it beautifully,” Dowling said.

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