Student work showcased on local stations

By Karen Plant
J-School Web reporter

photo by Neel Deshpande

Alex Krigsovld operates the camera for the UM News class

Bring together five reporter/photographer teams, two anchors, a director, a producer and an audio/cameraman, and you have a UM news crew ready to deliver a 3 ½-minute taped news piece to a local television station each week.

Two such TV crews, made up of broadcast journalism and production students, are providing weekly news segments to KPAX-TV and KECI-TV. The students cover Missoula- and university-related news stories for Assistant Professor Ray Fanning’s UM News class.

Fanning is new to UM this semester, but the RTV 450 & 460 class is not. The class has been part of the RTV curriculum since 2001.

“It is a great way for students to get on a local station,” he said. “They get a taste of a real-world situation where they are turning stories on deadline.”

Throughout the semester, the students rotate through numerous broadcast positions.

“One week we’ll be a director, one week we’ll be on audio/camera, and then we switch on and off pretty much each week,” student Andrew Granbois said.

In addition to taping weekly segments for KPAX and KECI, students take a rotation as the News Brief producer or director for public broadcasting stations.

“Every day we tape two 30-second Montana news updates for PBS stations across the state,” Fanning said.

And that’s not all. With the creation of a UM News class Web site, two jobs have been added to the student job rotation this semester: on-line producer and on-line director.

“They are in charge of getting the material on the Web site,” Fanning said. All student stories are posted on-line.

photo by Neel Deshpande

Kerry McKay on the air for UM News.

The 31 students are divided into two teams, maroon and silver. The teams meet each day to work on story ideas, scripts or editing. “Students pitch their own stories,” Fanning said.

On a given week, each reporter/photographer team produces a news-story-package running about 1 minute 30 seconds. The week’s assigned producer then looks at each news package and chooses one to run in full.  The remaining tape time is filled with shorter versions of the other stories.

So far this semester, stories have included coverage of a UM belly dance class, UM research on honeybees’ role in preparing the U.S. against terrorist attacks and J-School members’ views on freedom of speech following a controversial headline published in a Colorado State University’s newspaper.

On tape-day, the anchors are filmed introducing the selected stories. Then that week’s director edits the taped video and audio into a 3-1/2 minute segment before forwarding the tape to the television station.   
 
Maroon’s tape airs on "Montana This Morning" sometime between 6 and 7 a.m. on Tuesdays on KPAX channel 8. Silver’s airs on "Montana Today" each Thursday between 6 and 7 a.m. on KECI channel 13.

“They do a good job,” KPAX News Director Dennis Bragg said. “The class gives them the chance to expand their credentials.”

Silver team members Katie Stukey and Eli Hermann sat in front of the UM studio camera recently, fulfilling their turn as newscast anchors for the week. They practiced their lines under the massive lights while cameraman Granbois adjusted for the perfect angle. 

“Katie, try not to wiggle in your chair,” producer Melanie Overcast said as she watched the nearby flat-screen TV.

Director Jamie Leary gave the “three, two…” (point to Stukey) countdown.  And after several takes and beeps of the stopwatch, Stukey completed her opening, tag and goodbye segments for a story about a group of UM chemistry grad students trying to create eco-friendly alternatives to nylon and plastic.

Then the camera was turned to Hermann. After a bit of laughter and toe tapping between takes, Hermann completed his time on tape too.

“Normally, we would do this as a live taping,” audio-man Byron Norris said during a break in taping. “So we would be shooting all this in one take. But we don’t have all that set up right now, so we tape everything and go back and edit it all together.”

“We are still getting the servers installed and all the software,” Fanning said. “At some time this semester we’ll be doing things differently.”

Although the control room isn’t ready yet, Associate Professor Ray Ekness hopes everything will be up and running soon. “We’re shooting for mid-November,” he said.

For now, piecing the story together isn’t all that bad, Norris said.

Not to mention lower stress levels, he said. “It’s just a lot nicer. You can make the show look a lot better.”

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