UNO Television offers education, experience for student workers

Taylor Muller
News EditorThat person sitting next to you in class might be a local television celebrity.
At least, that could be the case if they work at UNO Television, the student-crewed television studio on campus.
With instruction and assistance from several faculty members of the College of Communicaion, Fine Arts and Media, the student crew "learns all aspects of a television production," according to Mark Dail, the studio's production coordinator.
"UNO Television, with the aid of students, creates programming of special interest for the campus and the Omaha area," said Jim Adams, UNO Television's assistant general manager.
Students, generally from within CCFAM, are hired to produce a wide variety of programming that the department broadcasts to Omaha and occasionally statewide.
Many members of the student crew said the experience they gain from working at a full-time television studio on campus is incredibly useful in securing a job in the real world.
"I know right now there are [at least] six members of our student crew who also work for the news stations around town," said David Healy, a senior student crewmember. "It really is a great springboard for the professional job market."
Healy said the hands-on experience he has gained while working at UNO Television is priceless.
"It's not just, 'do this because I say so,'" Healy said. "It's 'do this and this is why and this is how it turns out.'"
Janelle Hislop, a senior studio art major and crew member, originally considered being part of the crew as"an at school job that helps me get money," but said she soon found it could also teach her a lot.
Adams said one of the nearly half-dozen shows the studio has put on the air over the last year is a weekly live newscast called the Omaha News. Written, filmed and anchored by UNO students, the show is a chance for students to put their classroom knowledge to the test.
"That's what I'm after, to make sure they get the experience so when they go to local stations, even [if it's] not here, that they've already had that feeling of 'this is how we do it'," said Dail. "The important thing is they're getting the feeling of what it's like to start and stop, no going back to do it over."
But weekly newscasts are only the tip of the iceberg for UNO Television. Adams also explained that the studio's crew have produced multiple documentaries, one of them a high-definition feature on Madagascar.
"That's something that took a good two years to put together," explained Adams. "[It] involved a crew using state of the art high-def camera equipment traveling to Madagascar twice, to spend a week or two there shooting video of the people there [and] the animals we were showing."
Due to costs, no students were able to travel along for the trips, but were extensively involved in the rest of the documentary's production on campus.
For Hislop and her fellow student crewmembers, just having even a small part in creating professional grade work for the Omaha area while in an educational environment is a truly invaluable experience.
"Seeing the end result after getting everyone together, set it up, taped it, edited it, I think that's one of the best feelings," she said.