By Julia Duggan
Staff Writer
The College will begin offering a new interdisciplinary Broadcast and Multimedia Journalism minor for the fall semester. The new minor is designed to give students knowledge and experience in the vast broadcast journalism industry.
“I am very excited for this new minor,” said Donna Shaw, the chair of the Journalism and Professional Writing department. “We have been working on this for the past three years, so it is exciting to see it available to students.”
The driving force behind creating this new minor is the students, according to Shaw. Students from both the Journalism and Professional Writing department and Communication Studies department have been looking for more ways to improve their knowledge and experience before they apply for internships, Shaw said.
“I think with broadcast I am going to develop a lot of new skills that will open doors for me in my career,” said Emmy Liederman, a senior journalism and professional writing major who has decided to add the minor toward her degree.
After noticing a gap between the classroom and internships, Shaw, along with communication studies professor Paul D’Angelo, began collaborating to create the minor. Ideally, the combined minor would give the students more opportunities to grow before starting a professional internship.
“Technically, we have all five departments under the School of Arts and Communication represented in this new minor,” Shaw said. All five departments have at least one course for this minor — including the music department with their Audio Recording class.
“We have not done a lot of collaboration between the majors so I feel like this minor will be a good opportunity to just meet new people who have different career goals and ambitions and connect that with our projects,” Liederman said.
Shaw is also excited for the broadcast journalism course. The journalism department has hired a new adjunct professor, Lauren Dugan, to teach the course.
“I am just so excited to get to know the students because I was a student just a couple years ago and the only way I was able to get to where I am now is because I had so many people helping me every step of the way,” Dugan said. “I had so many professors helping me get internships. Then when I was in the internships I had so many reporters critiquing my work and kind of guiding me along the way. So I am just so excited to get to know the students, answer some of their questions, hear from what they're saying about what they think news is right now, and help them out because I want to do for someone else what so many people did for me.”
Dugan was just nominated for an Emmy in the Mid-Atlantic chapter for covering a story about a window shutter company that was forced to close due to the pandemic, but later reopened to make face masks for front-line workers. Dugan has been nominated for two other Emmys for stories she did when she was working in Charlotte, North Carolina.
“She has a really respectable background and she is going to be a great professor,” said Liederman, who is enrolled in her broadcast journalism course for this semester.
“I just think video is the most powerful form of storytelling because you can really just put someone in a scene, and show them what is happening,” Dugan said. “You can hear all the sounds, maybe an explosion or something like that, and then you can really see someone in a scene and show them what's happening. Then you can hear and see from the people that are at the center of the story, so I just think it's so powerful.”
