We Be Mass Communicatin!

 A very young me on local TV. Note the sports tie. 

I've collected a few dozen of those! See those peeling letters on the backdrop? 

I cut those out of copy paper and taped them to the backdrop my senior year, 

hoping to "up" the quality of our broadcast!

When I first stepped into the TV studio at John Brown University's broadcasting department 15 years ago, I was awestruck. The room was absolutely huge! Twenty-foot ceilings with hanging studio lights, a sit-com set in one corner and a news set in another. A big green screen on the wall and really big cameras on wheels. It was a freshman geek's heaven!

When I first visited JBU the spring before, I fell in love with the idea of broadcasting. After talking to one of the television profs, I made up my mind that I wanted to learn as much about radio and television as possible during my four years there and that fall I set about obtaining my lofty ambition. The first semester, I took "beginning radio" and learned about putting together radio newscasts, advertisements, and doing dramatic readings. I wasn't on the air yet, but I knew that if I was good enough, I'd be on the air in just a few months.

The next semester I was on-air to Northwest Arkansas via music station KLRC-FM and starting my courses in TV production and mass communications. By my third semester I was calling basketball games and anchoring sportscasts on television, working on-air at the campus radio station and has started to write news articles for the campus paper. Add to that a budding (and bumbling) baseball career, and I was in heaven.

Mass communication was so fun! Students were reading my written words, common folks were hearing my voice in their cars and at work, and I was sending basketball broadcasts through the telephone from far off gymnasiums. I was learning the importance of sending and receiving messages and how the manner of our delivery often shapes the message we deliver.



The Newest Oldest Technology

As I recall the "good old days" of the late 1990s, I have on my mind how much mass communication has changed in just a few years. There are still messages to deliver and the method still matters, but there are so many more methods now than there were 10 or 15 years ago. Just look at the development of the Internet, for example. It existed when I went off to college but its potential to be a source of news gathering and relay had yet to be tapped. Journalism entities were slow to jump on the e-bandwagon, perhaps for fear of the unknown. If you wanted to dig up a story, you used the telephone. If you wanted to videotape an interview, you sent a camera crew. If you wanted to broadcast the footage, you edited it from tape-to-tape and stuck the edited tape in a tape deck, ready for TV or cable broadcast.

Audio recording was done on 8-track-like "carts" that varied in length and could be recorded on only once before needing to be magnetically erased. Later, radio stations used either mini-discs or CD recorders for recording audio. Editing took place with multiple cart/disc decks and the skillful timing of a producer.

I was first exposed to computer editing at JBU but it was viewed as experimental technology. Now, there are no more tape-to-tape editing decks (or very few) and carts, mini-discs and CD recorders have followed suit. Everything is computer-based and digital.

My, how mass communication has changed!


When I was in broadcasting and journalism school, mass communication was through radio, television, newspapers and film. Now newspapers are dying, radio is quick to follow, television news has become entertainment and films... well, films are still films. It's sad to see my industries fade away. The very equipment I was trained on is no longer used in the communications professions. Most of what I've learned about shooting, editing and distributing media has come post-college. And college was only 11 years ago.

Information is communicated almost instantaneously these days thanks to the development of cell phones, social media websites, and computer media software. A person can shoot, edit and post anything within five minutes, sometimes quicker. They can video a fiery car crash with their iPhone and e-mail it to the local news station before the drivers even get out of their mangled vehicles.

On last week's Deadliest Catch TV show, I was blown away by something I saw. After a small fishing vessel capsized off the Aleutian Islands coast, a nearby ship rushed to the coordinates to assist the boat's four-man crew. The following rescue was captured on video, not by a documentary film crew, but by a camera phone. The whole five-minute sequence, with clear audio, was shot by one of the rescuing crew and the quality was amazing. I have an old Panasonic digital camcorder that couldn't capture better video. The Discovery Channel obtained the video from the fisherman and included it in their show. It was powerful.

During the recent earthquakes, camera phones captured both rubble and rescue and video from the impact zones was on the Internet within a half hour of the quakes. Texting has also revolutionized communication. Within minutes of each earthquake, Twitter, Facebook and other social networking sites were flooded with on-the-scene reports. Before a single journalist had landed on the ground — before a single helicopter had taken off to survey the scene, the whole world knew what had happened and how bad it was.

ABC News surprised the media world last month by announcing a new approach to the way its journalism is done. The major media entity will rely more on regular folks with cell phone cameras and other handheld devices to collect news stories, interviews and opinions than its paid news staff. As a result, a lot of producers, reporters, cameramen and behind-the-scenes folks will be out of work soon, as the network trims its budget and tries to streamline its news operation. CNN already uses "iReporters" to gather news and create online media content. These iReporters may be paid a few bucks, but I gather that most are just citizens with cameras and a healthy dose of curiosity.

Mass communication has been turned on its head in some ways. Ten to 15 years ago, mass communication was sent from selected entities to the masses. Now, it's sent from the masses to selected entities. The messages are the same: hard news, soft news, entertainment. The methods are changing, however. Those who hold broadcast-journalism degrees and have multi-point resumes like myself are wary of the way things are going, not because the people have been empowered but because anything and everything can be reported as news. No filters. In the old days, the professionals were the editors, weeding out fact from fiction. Now, each person is his or her own filter, and there are some awfully porous filters out there!

As I seek to use mass communication in the context of church ministry, I am wondering how the new age of communication is going to affect my efforts. Is simple video good enough anymore? Can I put ink to paper and have it be effective communication, or do I need to text message my words? How can I make sure a message I deliver is the message received?

It is a different age, though I hardly feel 11 years older than when I graduated. Time is a funny thing, you know.

Oh, and the fact that I am blogging is, in itself, evidence of the new communication age. Didn't have THAT when I was in school, either!



A few more pics for your amusement...

I actually won some awards for column writing during my junior and senior years of college from the Arkansas Collegiate Media Association. Here I am posing with a first place award at my Siloam Springs townhouse.

I cut my broadcasting teeth on college basketball, calling four years of JBU Golden Eagle hoops on both TV and radio (taped simulcast at home, live radio on the road). I also announced local high school hoops, including a state championship run for the Siloam Springs gals, and football. I loved doing on-camera work. Getting paid for it was a big bonus!