Students Determined To Do Serious Reporting

There’s a student revolution underway at Kent State University – and, no, you’re not having a flashback.

Journalism students at the Ohio school — indelibly linked to Vietnam-era unrest — are taking on a new incarnation of The Man: TV news.

Gearing up to rock the business by doing the kind of work “people pay attention to,” the students are rising up against local TV news they consider “pretty sad,” with reporting that only scratches the surface of issues and an abundance of fluff. 

“I care about the weather, but I don’t care about it for 15 minutes like I saw the other day,” says Andrew Jardy, a graduating senior and part-time production assistant at Fox-owned SportsTime Ohio.

Jardy says he’s not discouraged by studies showing TV news viewing is on the decline. “I feel like if people started doing investigative reporting that maybe those numbers would change,” he says. “I could do work that would make a difference and people would pay attention to.”

Jardy and his cohorts are already hard at work at accomplishing their goal, producing investigative reports on subjects they say have been “ignored” by commercial media, which they hope will be models for the work they will soon do as professionals.

Many of the investigations focus on college athletics, although they take on the local media, too. “It’s reporting that’s not being done by the local newspapers or TV stations,” says journalism professor Karl Idsvoog.

Take a look at:

• Grad student Shanice Dunning’s investigation into who receives full-ride scholarships from Kent State. She found the university awarded 122 such scholarships — which cover everything from tuition to room and board — to athletes and just two to academics.

• Megan Closser and Dunning’s visits to local TV stations to uncover data behind the political ads they run. One thing the students found: “Cleveland television stations don’t like television cameras.” That story was done in a response to a challenge from newsman Bill Moyers.

• A computer-assisted reporting class’s Cars for Coaches project examining the car policies of each Mid-American Conference athletic department and several other NCAA Division One universities in the region.

•  Students also found that the largest portion of the Kent State athletic department’s budget comes from the same place: fees charged to the academic students.

•  Idsvoog’s contribution, saying local reporters contribute to scandals in college athletics by cheerleading instead of doing their jobs.

• Jardy’s story showing that it’s the families of college athletes, and not the schools they play for, who are largely responsible for paying for sports-related medical costs.

Gabriel Kramer, a 21-year-old junior, is so whole-heartedly committed to The Cause that he sounds more like a Marine recruit than a guy whose “dream job” is being a TV news sports director.

“With the way journalism is going, we look at the future and see trouble on the horizon, but it’s an industry we still want to be part of and have hope for,” Kramer says. “We need to find a way to keep it alive.”

Kramer says the charge is not going to be easy — at least under current conditions when reporters “don’t make any money, there are no jobs and news directors realize that people can do the job of three people for one paycheck.”

So what’s the attraction?

“I think it’s an honorable profession,” Kramer says. “It’s a service if you can serve the people with the news and the knowledge and information and entertainment that they want.”

Broadcast journalism is also “just a lot of fun for me,” he says.

Which is really what it boils down to these particular Kent State students, who are well aware that the industry is not nearly as glamorous as it was before budget cuts and newsroom consolidations.

In fact, rumblings of bleak post-graduation prospects were enough for Shanice Dunning to give up plans to be a TV reporter the first time she considered it as an undergrad. But after a year working in PR, Dunning knew “it really wasn’t where my heart was” and returned to school for a master’s degree in journalism.

Dunning already is getting a taste of what may be ahead for her. She works part-time as an overnight assignment editor at WOIO Cleveland, Raycom’s CBS affiliate, with about an hour, and a commute nearly as long, between the end of her shift and start of a 9 a.m. class. She also completed a fellowship at Capitol Broadcasting CBS affiliate WRAL Raleigh, N.C.

Dunning says she knows accomplishing her goal of doing stories with depth will not be as easily achievable once she leaves Kent State.

“Here at school I can pretty much do any story I want. I’m not at the mercy of a manager or ratings or sponsors,” she says, adding she hopes to find a way to contribute meaningful stores despite such pressures. “I can try to change that whatever stations I work at when I get out of here,” she says. “I think this is definitely what I should be doing because I love so many different aspects of it.”

There’s no saying where these students will ultimately land, although they are keeping their options open. Dunning says a TV station in any market warmer than Ohio is good enough for her. “I don’t mind being paid in sunshine; I’ll take it,” she says. “But other than that, I don’t care where I go.”

The business has an equally precarious future.

“I wish I could say right now where the future of journalism was heading, but for now all we can do is learn,” Kramer says. “We can learn from covering the news.”

Read other Air Check columns here. You can send suggestions for future Air Checks to Diana Marszalek at [email protected].