By
Doug Mitchell
NPR’s Next Generation Radio
started in 2000 as a hands-on, web-distributed training ground meant to lure
talented college students, especially students of color, to public radio.
It’s worked. Our trainee alumni list
includes some of the newer on-air voices in public radio. Among them are Audie Cornish, co-host of NPR’s All Things Considered; Celeste Headlee, a fill-in host on NPR’s Tell Me More, now with Georgia
Public Broadcasting; and Shereen Marisol Meraji of
NPR’s Code Switch. Dozens more Next Generation
graduates are now at public media stations, and several have moved into
management as news directors.
We have held more than 50 workshops at
conventions, universities and NPR member stations. More than 300 students have
taken part in the training. Traci Tong of PRI’s The
World and I have trained radio journalists together since 1994, and
cinematographer and audio engineer Tom Krymkowski joined us beginning in 1999.
We
have a combined 55 years of experience leading boot-camp style workshops,
training college students in the art of public media-style sound gathering, writing,
editing and production, all geared toward developing a new generation of
storytellers.
Since founding Next Generation in 2000,
we’ve gone from teaching students to report and produce a newscast the same day
to leading them in developing the deeper stories that are the hallmark of
public media in the U.S.
After our most recent boot camp at the University of
Nevada-Reno, we talked about the lessons we’ve learned during the last 14 years
as we’ve worked toward the goal of getting a greater diversity of journalists
into public media newsrooms. Here are some of our thoughts:
Traci Tong, Senior Producer/Director of
PRI/BBC’s “The World":
We teach how to keep it simple and that
"good enough" is not good enough when it comes to preserving the art
of storytelling, particularly within public media. We don’t believe you can
become an expert at something before first being coached into conquering simple
things.
The new keywords for our newsroom?
Technology and social media.
Our projects have evolved into an
entirely new medium – a multimedia culture combining audio, visual, print and
the web.
We have had to teach students how to
become social media reporters in addition to visual and audio specialists. That
means we, the teachers, had to be immersed in the latest reporting trends.
Before our week in Reno, three of our students generated story ideas from
Facebook entries or tweets. They had already learned the business of connecting
to others and building relationships through social networks and were able to
penetrate communities normally not heard from.
And that's where our project has
particular resonance and has met our industry's future. We don't need to go
through a checklist of neighborhoods and communities to ensure coverage of a
diversity of groups. Most of our students were born and raised in them.
The social networks they are connected
to create a culture of sharing information, knowledge, voices and accents. We
used social media as a tool to market and distribute our stories and ideas, and
we spent a lot of the time listening. Rocio Hernandez’s story about a rape survivor who became
a sex columnist was a perfect example of how the Next Generation
students were able to access stories using tools and experience.
Tom Krymkowski, cinematographer, video
editor, audio engineer:
I'm glad we've chosen to slow down in our
approach over the years. We're constantly fine-tuning, adding and removing
things from the process, but we keep it simple. We provide a structured
environment. We set difficult, yet attainable goals. We monitor progress and
jump in to help when needed. Instead of simulating a daily newsroom like we did
in the past, we've narrowed it down to the most important takeaways.
And ultimately we end up passing on the
tradition of aural storytelling, which really is the foundation from which
everything else is built.
I do think we have to fight even harder
to make sure the basics are being taught and the higher standards that we hold
to are passed on to the next generation. "Good enough" is the siren
song of the day. Just because we can get away with lower quality work doesn't
mean we should. In their classrooms, our students are being asked to become
Jacks of all trades, and sadly, masters of none. With each year, they equate
use of their ever-expanding toolset with knowledge of reporting. Our workshop
at its core is an exercise in audio journalism with additional skills used to
support it.
We're teaching our craft both as it has
always existed and as it's evolving. But I think ultimately the strength of the
program comes down to the mentor-student pairings; the personal passing of the
torch from one generation to the next. That's the part I get the most out of,
especially as I find myself more in the role of a mentor to the mentors.
Doug Mitchell:
We have all the tools anyone can ask
for when it comes to gathering stories. We have more than we need for
distributing those stories. What we continue to push in the Next Generation
programs is the ability to find a story by talking to people, face-to-face.
To that end, we have to continue to
insist that we grow the art form of talking to people who are different from
ourselves.
Doug Mitchell, a digital journalist and
entrepreneur, is founder of NPR’s “Next Generation Radio,” which returns this
October in Seattle. He consults with NPR, helping connect young journalists
with public media organizations across the country. He is a former ICFJ Knight
International Journalism Fellow and Fulbright Senior Specialist to Chile.
Image courtesy of Doug Mitchell.
Source: Ijnet.org
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