Last Thursday, the four candidates running for Governor in MA made their way to UMass Dartmouth for a debate, presumably about the issues facing the southcoast of the state. As it would turn out, they really just answered five questions about state wide jobs, and I think at one point Tim Cahill started doodling a la Jackie Treehorn on his free pad of paper. It was a boring, pointless exhibition in political hackery with more useless questions than the first five minutes of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire."
Every local media outlet in the area, including my own radio station (1480 WSAR! Listen Live now on WSAR.com!) and every single solitary newspaper in the region covered the event live. Going through the provided means given to us lame, techy-like people, each of us were given a link to UMass Dartmouth's live video stream. Great. Fantastic. Outstanding. Problem is, the guy we were all dealing with who oversees both the student run radio and TV stations had no idea what he was doing. I mean that literally. If thrown into a lion pit and was told to defuse a bomb, I'd have a better chance.
In conversations with the guy, and from previous experience in college radio stations, I was fairly confident his only expertise was hitting the button that says "TALK." That'd be great if the poor guy didn't have to run the entire damn school media. Once I started throwing out "questions" and "technical words" and trying to address potential "issues" that could "f*** us out of thousands of dollars in sponsorships," he kind of got a little ornery to say the least. Our conversation ended with me asking if there was some sort of audio backup, should the video fail, and I got a one word email back.
No.
In the end, the experience was a disaster that cost the local papers a LOT of advertising dollars, and a whole hell of a lot of angry web viewers wondering why the video of the debate was terrible.
WARNING: TECH MOMENT: they just set up a camera with no feed into the candidates microphones, meaning it was akin to just shooting a debate from 150 feet away with a cell phone. Because the candidates used wireless microphones to speak, there was also bled over RF that caused the viewing and listening audience to hear a nearby oldies station. The debate sounded awful, but The Temptations have never sounded better. If you got any of that last paragraph, I both congratulate and pity you.
Luckily, because I didn't trust the set up, I created a back up plan that got us the audio feed from UMass' radio station online. The papers? Not so much luck.
The fact that such a person, and this goes well beyond the dreary greystone campus of UMass-D, has control over student media operations is a disservice to the actual students. There is no technical understading of the business, which means the students won't get any either. I'm positive that if anybody looked into it, the young man in charge probably has a degree in history and spent the last few years as a teaching understudy. But because student media is seen as a busy project at some schools, it's acceptable to throw them into this situation. The result was a disaster of a project, a complete lack of faith in an entire university's media department, and the loss of thousands of dollars. The stupidest part being this: had the governor's "people" opted to hold the debate down the road at the much less esteemed Bristol Community College auditorium, it would have gone off without a hitch. The theatre is nicer, bigger, and run by several people with technical experience in both audio and visual media.
I guess the community college setting wasn't up to par with the candidate's high standards.
It's generally upsetting to me to constantly have potential interns coming through my office every semester looking for experience, have several years of college radio under their belts, and absolutely no concept of how the operation even comes close to working. Student media shouldn't be mental fodder for kids with mohawks who love Arcade Fire; it should be a learning ground for a pretty fun business with a lot of different nooks and crannies that can find even the poor voiced (uh...me?) being usefull in the realm of the media. Instead...every intern I have either wants to talk about the Patriots or talk about how sick Buckethead is. They don't know how the on-air process works, they don't know anything technically works, and they don't care. And THAT is the fault of the colleges who put people like my UMass-Dartmouth friend in charge, then expect to still be looked at as credible.
Give me the guys at the community college.
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