Univision, Conference Calls, Story Corps, & Memorial Day With New York Film Academy Broadcast Journalism School

Here in the United States, the months when national TV audiences are measured are known as “sweep” months. This past May was just such a month, and the local news programs on stations that are part of the Univision television network did very well; in fact, they made history,  finishing first in a number of key demographic groups and time periods.

What makes this especially historic is that all of the programming on Univision is in Spanish, yet these Spanish-language news programs drew a larger audience than English language news broadcasts in the same cities. It says a great deal about changing audiences, and a changing America.

A primary lesson to be learned from these results is that news organizations need to continually look for novel ways to engage audiences.

The Neiman Lab at Harvard University, a research group that studies American journalism, reported recently that The New York Times is using conference-call technology to bring together hundreds of subscribers for what might be called “a private radio program.” Much like a conventional radio talk show, there are subject experts and the opportunity to “call in,” only — instead of being broadcast — it is distributed by telephone: often mobile phones.

One of the things that typifies all of the departments at the New York Film Academy (NYFA), not just the Broadcast Journalism program, is an emphasis on storytelling. As broadcast journalists, we are in the business of “electronic storytelling.” One of my favorite examples is an organization called Story Corps. This nonprofit group travels the country collecting stories from everyday people. They do it in a novel way, in that they ask people to visit their small mobile recording booths in pairs. And it is there the storytelling happens. Recently, Story Corps began to create animations which portray some of these stories. This is especially important for social media, where people respond to images more than audio.

Here is a wonderful example, posted online late last month for Memorial Day, the day when America remembers its war dead. And like all the best stories, it has a twist…

The multimedia journalism (MMJ) skills students learn at the NYFA can be used in a wide range of ways. Former summer session student Alexandra Saeys was recently the on-site reporter for a digital conference called #DES2018, the Digital Business World Conference, which was held in Madrid. As you can see in the picture below, she had all the necessary resources to capture insights and trends that were being hotly debated at the conference.

Congratulations Alexandra!

Staying in Europe, in Georgia (“the country, not the state”), New York Film Academy alum Mariam Shalikashvilli works for Georgia Public Broadcasting. And while she is pretty tall, for one stand-up she needed to be a little taller. I don’t think she brought the little platform she is standing on in the picture below. In fact I think she “found it.” But in either case, it was just right.

We end this week with a moving Memorial Day story produced by former Broadcast Journalism student Melissa Aleman, who works at CW33 in Dallas, Texas. She wrote: