Posts filed under ‘College of Communications’
Jeremy Cohen Takes His Fish on the Road
In our January/February issue we showcased some beautiful underwater photography from Jeremy Cohen, who is an associate VP at Penn State and who does scuba diving/photography as a hobby.
It turns out that that photo essay has led to some additional visibility for Jeremy’s work. Penn State Great Valley hosted an exhibit of his photos in April and May, as a result of the gallery director having seen our story.
More recently, the director of the Museum of Arts and Culture at New Rochelle High School in New York was looking at her son’s copy of The Penn Stater and saw the photo essay. She contacted Jeremy and arranged for 50 of his images to hang at the museum this summer.
“I’ll also have an opportunity in September,” Jeremy tells us, “to talk with students in New Rochelle about (more…)
An Hour With Gerry Abrams
Members of the Penn State Class of 1961 are in town this weekend for their 50th reunion, and yesterday several hundred of them crammed into an assembly room at the Nittany Lion Inn to hear one of their more famous classmates speak.
Gerald Abrams ’61 has been a television producer for more than four decades, with credits like Nuremberg, Florence Nightingale, Flesh and Blood, Found Money, and The Gift, among many others. (He’s also getting to be equally known for being the father of J.J. Abrams, director of Mission Impossible, Star Trek, and now Super 8.) Abrams was joined in the session by Matt Jordan, an assistant professor in the College of Communications.
Jordan first took the audience on a little tour of the history of television, then played the role of James Lipton and lobbed a few questions at Abrams. After that, Abrams’ classmates got to ask him some questions as well.
Here are couple of the questions from Jordan and the audience, along with Abrams’ answers:
How did Penn State prepare you to work in TV? “It didn’t. There was no television curriculum when I attended. The television curriculum today in the College of Communications is so sophisticated. They’re now teaching things like how to produce interactive game shows, for students who might be interested in that field.”
What can be done about the decreasing quality of television programming in our country—profanity, sex, etc.? (more…)
Watch No. 4 Street of our Lady In Your Own Home
If you’ve not yet seen No. 4 Street of Our Lady, the film by three Penn State filmmakers that tells the story of a Catholic Polish woman who saved 15 Jewish neighbors from the Nazis during World War II, there’s an easy way to remedy that. The film, by Barbara Bird, Judy Maltz, and Richie Sherman, is being distributed more widely.
You can download it from iTunes, or rent or buy it from Amazon. (You can watch a free excerpt there, too.) The film is listed on Netflix, but”proof of demand” is required for the company to release it. If you add the film to your Netflix queue, you can help create that demand.
The film is continuing to get attention. The rescuer, Francisca Halamajowa, was honored posthumously three weeks ago by the Anti-Defamation League; two granddaughters accepted the award. And it’s also been added to the materials available at Facing History, which provides resources for teachers both in the United States and internationally.
Lori Shontz, senior editor
Connecting with Ben Feller
One of the secrets to good reporting—and it’s not much of a secret, really—is connecting with people. So about five minutes into Ben Feller’s talk Tuesday night at the Foster Conference of Distinguished Writers, it was pretty clear how he’d risen from general assignment reporter at the Centre Daily Times (“you should read my bear-hunting stories—they’re awesome”) to chief White House correspondent for The Associated Press.
Feller ’92, who appeared on the cover of our May/June 2009 issue, talked about visiting his dad in his campus office, eating lunch with his mom at the HUB, and his favorite bar. “To this day,” he said. “If I could pick anywhere in the world to have a beer, it would be Zeno’s.”
Connection made.
And just as everyone on the Penn State football beat has a Joe Paterno imitation, Feller displayed not only a good Barack Obama, but a pretty darn good Bill Clinton, whom he never covered in the White House. Asked if he wanted to do George W. Bush, Feller said, “Not right now,” in the voice—and with the hand motions—of The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart imitating Bush.
A young woman sitting near me exclaimed, “That was awesome!” (more…)
Long-Distance Learning with Bob Richards
The last time I sat in a room taking notes from Bob Richards, I was a Penn State undergrad who spent 30 hours a week in the Daily Collegian newsroom and substantially less time on my actual class work. I like to think that schedule explains why I had to take Richards’ media law class twice.
Thursday, I felt much more studious as I sat in a room taking notes from Richards, the John and Ann Curley Professor of First Amendment studies in the College of Communications. As Tina wrote Thursday, a few of us are out in Denver for the annual CASE conference of alumni magazine editors, and Richards is one of the speakers. He knows more about First Amendment law and how it applies to the working media than just about anyone, and for those of us who write, edit, and blog for a living, his insights on ever-evolving copyright law are invaluable.
Like all great teachers, Richards long ago figured out how to make media law accessible for folks with no real interest in or knowledge of the actual law: Frame hypothetical questions within pop culture references the audience can relate to. So, there we were Thursday, debating the legality of reporting second-hand on a rambling on-campus speech from Charlie Sheen, or whether it was kosher to reprint, without stated permission, tweets from prominent alumni. (It’s amazing how often the answer to such questions is “it depends.”)
It’s always cool to run into Penn Staters in far-flung places. It’s especially cool to see Penn State faculty spreading their expertise halfway across the country. And it’s even cooler when they’re not grading you.
Ryan Jones, senior editor
Catching up with Al Jazeera’s Jeff Ballou
When the Egyptian protests broke out in January, Al Jazeera English quickly emerged as one of the top sources for 24/7 news coverage. Thanks to the network’s live online broadcasts, web traffic to the Al Jazeera English website exploded, with an increase of more than 2,500 percent, with 50 percent of those web visitors coming from the U.S. There’s now talk of the network landing a spot on U.S. cable and dish lineups.
Jeff Ballou ’90 is deputy news editor for Al Jazeera English. Since 2006, Ballou has worked from the network’s Washington, D.C., bureau, vetting and gathering news from the Western hemisphere for its global news bulletins. We checked in with Jeff this week to hear about his experience covering Egypt’s revolution (spoiler alert: no sleep) and the future of Al Jazeera English.
Al Jazeera English seemed to “scoop” many of its competitors with the live broadcast from Egypt. Why was providing this coverage important?
I think what’s really interesting is that events have been unfolding so fast across the region that from the time I finally had time to address Egypt, we had gone full-on covering Libya—thanks to actions attributed to Muammar Gaddafi, a far more violent, graphic, and disturbing story. And we still have to keep Tunisia, Yemen, and Bahrain on the radar.
We provided in-depth coverage on Egypt first because it was an enormous story. There has not been this kind of recent popular uprising in at least two decades a la Eastern Europe. Second, as the one major independent global news network not based in the West, we felt it important to not only cover the unfolding events, but explain them with the experience and analysis like no one else could.
In the past, Al Jazeera has been criticized for having an anti-American bias. How do you respond to that? (more…)
Follow Along During THON
This photo from Penn State Public Information shows students preparing the floor for THON. They started at 5 a.m. Friday.
Earlier today, a couple of us were trying to figure out what percentage of the student body is participating in THON, which officially gets underway at 6 p.m. Friday—in a little less than two hours. We’re not sure, but we’re guessing between a third and a half of the students at the University Park campus are involved somehow—dancers, volunteers, cheering on from the stands—and there are plenty of students from other campuses here for the big event.
And of course the THON families—children and their parents who are being helped by the Four Diamonds Fund, the reason 700 students will be dancing for 46 hours this weekend at the Bryce Jordan Center—are in town, too.
If you can’t be there, there are still plenty of ways to follow along. Here are some of the best:
The Daily Collegian’s reporters are blogging here, and the staff at StateCollege.com is doing the same thing here.
On Twitter: follow the Collegian (@dailycollegian), Onward State (@thonwardstate), and anything with the hashtag #thon2011.
And the College of Communications is again dispatching more than 150 students to cover the event, including a live webstream. You can find all of that coverage here.
Last year, THON raised more than $7.8 million for the Four Diamonds Fund. Check back at the end of the weekend for more details from this year’s event.
Lori Shontz, senior editor
Rich Russo Just Might Be Super Bowl MVP
You won’t actually see him on Sunday, and, just like the officials on the field, it’ll be better if his presence isn’t noticed at all. That’ll mean that Rich Russo ’84 has done his job. Russo, a 10-time Emmy winner for Fox Sports, will direct the network’s coverage of Super Bowl XLV.
As you might imagine for a guy who’s made his career in sports broadcasting, Russo says directing the big game is a dream come true. Our colleague Steve Sampsell from the College of Communications got that and much more from Russo in this story; you can get a bit more from the man himself in this 2009 Q&A. The highlight of that interview is hearing that, while Russo will be focused on the Steelers and Packers this weekend, ”the ultimate would be to direct the BCS national championship game when Penn State is playing. Hopefully that will happen.”
Ryan Jones, senior editor
A Conversation with Tom Verducci
I remember Sports Illustrated‘s Tom Verducci ’82 from back in the late 1970s/early 1980s, when I was covering Penn State football for State College radio station WRSC and he was a sports reporter for the Collegian. What I most remember was his willingness to ask Joe Paterno tough questions at the news conferences after football games. I think Joe found it a little irritating (but then, Joe finds most members of the news media irritating at one time or another), but I remember that they were smart questions and I was impressed with Tom for asking them.
Here we are 30 years later and Tom is one of the most respected sportswriters in America. A senior writer at SI, he has covered baseball—especially the Yankees—for years, and wrote the SI piece that blew open the steroids scandal in 2002. He’s also the co-author of Joe Torre’s book The Yankee Years, and in 2009 SI published a book called Inside Baseball: The Best of Tom Verducci.
Last night he spoke in the HUB as part of a series sponsored by the John Curley Center for Sports Journalism. And one of the things he mentioned was (more…)
A Penn Stater’s Film at Sundance
I figure if you’re a young filmmaker, there can’t be many bigger honors than having your film chosen to play at the Sundance Film Festival. Christopher Radcliff ’04 has that beat, though: His film will play Thursday on Sundance’s opening night.
Radcliff co-wrote and co-directed “The Strange Ones,” a 15-minute short, with his graduate-school classmate at Columbia University, Lauren Wolkman. “As an aspiring indie-filmmaker, Sundance is pretty much as good as it gets,” Radcliff said in this story at live.psu.edu. “And playing during opening night is really cool. I just hope people like the film.”
While you’re waiting for the reviews—and we’ll keep an eye out for them—you can take a look at the trailer here, and you can learn a little more about Radcliff and the film at the NYC Cine blog.
Lori Shontz, senior editor
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