When I finally met Keith Jackson ’54 last summer, I felt like I was meeting a friend. He didn’t know it, but we had already spent numerous Saturdays together. While he was calling the biggest games in college football, I was a fan, enjoying not just the games, but the spectacle and excitement that Keith communicated so skillfully to audiences.
Listening to Keith call a game, it was easy to get lost in the excitement of the event. He was a nearly flawless professional—this was obvious to even a casual fan. What set Keith apart from other broadcasters is that he respected the games and … » More …
When Ana Cabrera ’04 first set foot on Washington State University’s Pullman campus in 2000, she had no idea she’d be live on national television in 17 years.
She didn’t know she’d go on to work as a weekend anchor for CNN and live in New York City. She was unaware that she’d cover major stories like riots in Ferguson, marijuana legalization, and immigration—or that her life would soon be at the 24/7 mercy of the “news gods.” And she certainly couldn’t predict that the president of the United States would call her and her fellow journalists the “enemy.”
What she did know was … » More …
Before broadcaster Robert Mott founded NPR, he helped bring Washington State’s communication education into the television era.
National Public Radio cofounder and former Washington State professor Robert Mott briefly appeared on a large projection screen before the video image froze and then disappeared. Again.
Mott waited patiently in his San Diego home as some of his former broadcast students, now in their 60s and 70s, double-checked the video chat settings from the Yakima conference room where they’d gathered. He wasn’t too worried.
Their bond, after all, had been forged in an era of technological innovation, though that was a half century earlier when many problems … » More …
Images That Injure
edited by Susan Dente Ross and Paul Martin Lester
Praeger, 2011
WSU English professor Ross and her colleagues examine pictorial stereotypes in the media.
Seaside Stories
by S.R. Martin, Jr. ’74
Blue Nile Press, 2009
Short stories of life in Seaside, on California’s Monterey Peninsula.
Life Histories of Cascadia Butterflies
by David G. James and David Nunnallee
Oregon State University Press, 2011
A unique chronicle of the life cycles of the butterfly species native to Cascadia. Read the feature article.
The world watched people rise up this year against dictators and authoritarian regimes across the Middle East and northern Africa, their protests aired by satellite television and the Internet. In Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Bahrain, and other countries, journalists televised, twittered, and spread the “electronic virus,” as Lawrence Pintak calls the media revolution, around the Arab world.
Pintak, founding dean of the Murrow College of Communication and a former Middle East correspondent for CBS, says satellite TV plays the critical role in the protests. Eighty percent of the Arab world gets its news from television, and international news in Arabic, produced by … » More …
Sitting at Rico’s next to Frontline executive producer David Fanning was a defining moment for one Washington State University broadcasting student.
Senior communication major Kate Yeager was among a small group of broadcast students who closed the bar with Fanning and Frontline producer Mike Kirk after the Murrow Symposium. Kate was playing host to the Edward R. Murrow Award recipients from the PBS investigative reporting program.
The group discussed media, politics, and today’s hottest issues around a large table at the pub in downtown Pullman.
“We had this big table,” she says. “He was like a rock star-it was like walking in with Elvis.”
Fanning … » More …
This spring, while a reporter from a Spokane TV station sat face to face with 60 Minutes creator Don Hewitt, two Washington State University communications students waited quietly in the hall for their turn with the television legend.
Jamie Grosz, a senior who would soon be interviewing the CBS news veteran, used the time to run over her questions and switch into a pair of high heels for the on-camera interview. The cameraman, Brent Weisberg, started unpacking his equipment.
They weren’t missing much by waiting outside since the Spokane station interview covered many of same questions Hewitt had been answering over the past few … » More …