Posing with the Kansas House resolution, congratulating the A.Q. Miller School of Journalism and Mass Communications on its centennial: Rep. Tom Hawk, Democrat from the 67th District; Steven Smethers, associate professor; Rep. Mike Burgess, Republican from the 51st District and 1998 graduate of the Miller School; Gloria Freeland, assistant professor; and Rep. Sydney Carlin, Democrat from the 66th District. The Kansas Senate passed a similar resolution, sponsored by Sen. Roger Reitz, Manhattan.

In 1910, Kansas State Agricultural College established a department of industrial journalism – one of the first of its kind in the country. Printing merged with industrial journalism in 1915, and in 1950, the program was renamed the Department of Technical Journalism.

In 1971, mass communications was added to the name to account for new media and a broader curriculum. In 1988, the school was renamed as the A.Q. Miller School of Journalism and Mass Communications to honor a Kansas newspaperman with deep ties to the school.

In September – 100 years after its founding – the Miller School is planning a party.

Gloria Freeland (’75), associate professor in mass communications and centennial coordinator, said the theme for this fall’s celebration is “Preserving the past, preparing for the future.”

“The idea for our centennial is that we’re going to find out about our history,” Freeland said. “I think it’s a good opportunity for students to know where we came from and to know our legacy, but then we’re also trying to prepare students for the future.”

Freeland, along with students, other faculty and staff members and alumni, began working on the centennial last summer. Freeland is also working with the Alumni Association, the KSU Foundation and University Archives.

The festivities are scheduled to kick off Sept. 2 with a Huck Boyd Lecture in Community Media, given by Gail Pennybacker (’81), from WJLA-TV in Washington, D.C. Other events planned over the three-day celebration include activities in Aggieville Thursday night, a banquet and program Friday evening and a tailgate at Saturday’s K-State vs. UCLA football game.

Steve Wolgast develops a photo during the 1987-88 school year. Wolgast is now an instructor and faculty adviser to the Collegian.

Alumni will also have the opportunity to connect with current students in the classroom and through various workshops.

“To see our current students and our former students all together in a setting where there’s going to be so much networking going on,” said Angela Powers, director of the Miller School. “I’m excited about that.”

Students are also helping prepare for the centennial. Freeland said members of the public relations techniques class are handling the social media aspects of the celebration, and faculty members Ginger Loggins and Stacy Neumann are guiding students in creating a DVD to be shown and distributed at the banquet.

Anna Lewis, senior in public relations and electronic journalism, and the executive producer of the DVD has worked with Freeland on the official centennial logo, save-the-date information card, a Web site and other promotional materials.

Part of the centennial effort will include a fundraising campaign called Tools for Tomorrow. According to Powers, money raised by the effort will go toward providing up-to-date equipment for students and classrooms.

“Our goal is to raise $100,000 for 100 years, so we can have an account that we can rely on for technology in our classrooms,” Powers said. “We want to engage as many alumni as we possibly can to secure a good, solid future for our school and for our students.”

Powers said money can be raised in a variety of ways. In addition to general donations, a silent auction, scheduled for the Sept. 3 banquet, will feature K-State memorabilia, autographed photos and books and other items.

Lewis, whose grandfather and two uncles are Miller School graduates, said working on the centennial has been an eye-opening experience. She said she now understands why many generations of families, like her own, return to the school.

“The people who are involved with the school, now or in the past, have only good

things to say about it. They don’t credit the facilities or the top-of-the-line equipment, they credit the people they work with every day,” Lewis said. “The faculty is very dedicated to being a significant part of each student’s college career.”

Todd Simon, professor and former director of the Miller School from 1997-2004, echoed Lewis’ sentiments. He said the size of the school allows for close relationships between teachers and students.

“My favorite thing about this place is that it remains — despite changes in technology — a place where there’s a lot of interaction,” Simon said. “Students and faculty get to know each other on a first-name basis.”

And while Simon admits he has no idea what the future holds, he said he is confident the Miller School will remain committed to its core principles.

A student pauses to read the Collegian in the spring of 1978. The first edition of the paper was published in 1896, then named The Student Herald.

“While other [journalism programs] have more money and might be considered more prestigious, we’ve been very consistent in our mission for 100 years. We remain really committed to our story-telling roots,” Simon said. “I don’t really see that changing.”

The media themselves, however, are constantly changing, and curriculum changes are inevitable. But, as Powers pointed out, the Miller School has been successful in weathering changes in the past.

“It says a lot about the fact that we value journalism and First Amendment issues that we’ve survived for a century. That’s not an easy thing to do. There are many programs that have come and gone and been swallowed up by larger programs,” Powers said.

Lewis said the centennial celebration in September is the perfect opportunity for those in the Miller School to remember their roots, while laying the foundation for the next century.

“With faculty, alumni and students working together, the history and tradition of the Miller School will be preserved,” Lewis said. “And they can look ahead to prepare for another 100 years.”

Read more about the Miller School’s Centennial celebration.

Teope poses with his Emmy Award after his fantasy football show earned honors at the Mid America Emmy Awards Gala.

The lights grew dim and voices hushed in the Renaissance Hotel ballroom in St. Louis, Mo., on Oct. 3, 2009. Men and women dressed in tuxedos and evening gowns anxiously waited to learn if they would be Emmy Award winners — or if they would be going home empty-handed.

In the crowd Herbie Teope, a self-proclaimed “career junior,” waited to hear if he would be one of the chosen to take home an Emmy.

Teope, who has had anything but a conventional educational career, will return to K-State in the summer to fulfill a promise to his father: to get his degree.

After serving 20 years in the military and freelancing for the fantasy sports Web site, Rotowire.com, Teope came to K-State to major in print journalism in 2004. He said his experiences in the military, at K-State and writing for nationally acclaimed Web sites led him to the moment he would be in Emmy contention.

Fred Brock, Teope’s former journalism professor, said Teope’s life experiences and motivation has made him the excellent journalist that he is today.

“Herbie is motivated and going to succeed and do whatever it takes to succeed,” Brock said. “I have had plenty of students who are just as talented as Herbie, but they do not have the drive and dedication that Herbie has.”

In 2006, after only two years at K-State, Teope decided to leave and take an internship with Time Warner Cable and Metro Sports. By this time Teope’s work on Rotowire.com had gained national exposure and had been cross-published on sites such as Yahoosports.com and ESPN.com.

“My internship with Time Warner Cable and Metro Sports really opened my eyes to other aspects of journalism,” Teope said. “I was used to print journalism, and Time Warner Cable was broadcast journalism. I remember K-State professor Barb Smith telling me how important it is to be a diverse journalist and I learned that at Time Warner.”

After covering the 2006 Chiefs training camp in River Falls, Wis., Teope was offered a full-time position with Time Warner Cable and Metro Sports.

“When I told my father I was going to accept the job and not return to school he was not a happy camper,” Teope said. “I am the only one in my family who doesn’t have a degree, so my father made me promise him that I would one day go back to school and get my degree.”

As the Mid-America Emmy Awards gala progressed, Teope said uncertainty dominated his thoughts. As nominee for an award in the category of interview discussion programming, Teope is the creator and co-host of the Time Warner Cable and Metro Sports program “Fantasy Huddle.”

“We’re not going to win,” Teope said to himself. “Mike Leonard (the host for the evening and an NBC correspondent) has never won an Emmy in his 30 years in the industry. There’s no way in the world we’re going to win.”

The moment arrived. As the nominations were read Teope’s nerves ran wild.

“When they said, ‘And the Emmy goes to…’ and mentioned us, I went completely blank,” Teope said. “I remember sitting at the table thinking ‘This really happened’ and the walk from the table to the stage being a complete blur.”

Co-Hosts, Chris Gough, Dave Neilson and Herbie Teope on set of the Metro Sports' program Fantasy Huddle. Fantasy Huddle airs on Thursdays at 6:30 pm during the football season. Photo courtesy of Time Warner Cable and Metro Sports.

Teope had only been a part of the Time Warner Cable and Metro Sports team for two weeks when he pitched the idea of “Fantasy Huddle,” a 30-minute program on the booming industry of fantasy football, to Time Warner Cable’s general manager and news director.

“Fantasy football is a thriving and booming multi-billion dollar industry. You can’t get away from it,” Teope said. “Time Warner didn’t have a fantasy-related program, Comcast did. It just hit me. Time Warner needed a fantasy program and that’s when I pitched my idea.”

After Teope’s pitch, Time Warner Cable knew this was a project it wanted to invest time and money in. A year of planning and acquiring sponsorships led to the debut of “Fantasy Huddle” during the 2007 football season. At that time the show was only distributed locally in Kansas City. However, Teope and the rest of the “Fantasy Huddle” staff soon realized that after only being on air for a year the program would be distributed nationally to 17 out of the 21 Time Warner markets.

“Fantasy Huddle has been so well received by audiences around the country because of the detailed information and analysis,” said John Sprugel, Metro Sports assistant general manager and news director. “I am very proud of Herbie and the other co-hosts for their dedication and commitment to producing the absolute best fantasy football program available on television.”

Teope said the success of the show can be credited to the people behind the scenes and the chemistry between all of the on and off-air team members.

“The ‘Fantasy Huddle’ team is great to work with,” said Marcia Schmidt, “Fantasy Huddle” director and line producer. “It is a very fun and relaxed environment, but at the same time Herbie is organized and knows what he wants.”

Teope knows at some point will have to choose between the show and going back to K-State to fulfill his promise to his father. Or choose between the show and, in his words, a “BBD” — a bigger and better deal. Parting ways with his show would be a hard decision, but he is convinced it would be in good hands.

“If there ever came a time where I would have to 100 percent walk away from the show and move onto something else it would be bittersweet,” Teope said. “The show was my creation, but it’s the nature of the industry, people move on.”

As Teope approached the podium to give his acceptance speech, he quickly snapped out of his adrenaline-induced blur and into true journalist professional mode. After thanking his co-hosts, producers and those who believed in his idea, Teope walked off stage, Emmy in hand, knowing he had made it.

Tallgrass Brewery, founded in 2007, is located about five miles from K-State's campus. Jeff Gill, owner of Tallgrass, went to K-State students for help in getting the word about his brewery.

Jeff Gill started the Tallgrass Brewing Company with his wife, Tricia back in 2007. They enlisted students to come up with new ideas for getting the word out on the microbrewery, which is located a little less than five miles away from K-State’s campus off Highway 24.

“We have done this in the past, a few times now,” said Gill, a 1997 K-State graduate. “We are so young that we need to get the word out about Tallgrass and all the unique beers that we do and are capable of doing more of in the future. I think students bring a fresh perspective to our marketing needs and many fresh, cool ideas.”

The class of 17 broke up into three teams. Each team was responsible for developing an advertising campaign for Tallgrass from which Gill could potentially take ideas and incorporate them into his marketing plan.

“Many times our small size allows us to see quickly where the ideas could possibly fit into our marketing plan,” Gill said.

There is no concrete set of objectives each project needs to accomplish.

“Agencies are not in the business of asking the client what they want to do,” said Thomas Gould, associate professor in journalism and mass communications. “Agencies are in the business of telling the client what they need to do. You never ask the client what their budget is. You tell the client what their budget needs to be to accomplish a certain goal.”

There is no communication between the teams during the course of the semester.

“You don’t know what the other groups are doing,” said Tricia Robben, senior in mass communications. “Their campaign is secret and separate.”

The campaign is broken down into three fields: research, media and creative. It then becomes a competition between the three groups with the winner in each category being announced at the end of the semester.

“Gill came in and was allowed to bring as many people as he wanted,” Gould said. “How the teams pitch their ideas and how well they know the product is a big factor in determining who wins in each category.”

The project was part of Thomas Gould's Advertising Campaigns class. Students in the class were split into groups and competed to design an ad campaign.

By the end of the semester, each team knew Tallgrass inside and out: that there are 1525 microbreweries in the U.S., which produced 4.2 million barrels of beer in 2009; that Boulevard Brewing Company in Kansas City, Mo., is one of Tallgrass’s main competitors; that Tallgrass Oasis was due to come out in the Spring of 2010. All of these facts were always at the back of their minds.

After all of the teams had completed their projects and pitched to Gill, students who had worked on the “Tallgrass: State of Mine” campaign swept all three categories, an unprecedented event in the eyes of Gould.

“It was unusual,” Dr. Gould said. “The best research proposal, the best creative, the best media seldom all comes from the same group.”

Gould has overseen Advertising Campaigns for a number of years and has had his students work with a wide array of clients. Companies have ranged from Coca-Cola to Proctor and Gamble. However, Gould is making a more concerted effort to keep things local.

“I like trying to keep it close to home because it makes it easier for the students to actually work with a person versus having someone come in from Cincinnati and talk to the kids for a few days then leave, which is what we had with P&G,” Gould said. “In campaigns we always try and work with a live client, that is someone who is interested in what the students are going to produce and possibly use it but more importantly somebody who is actually relying on them to tell them what they need to do.”

Gould feels the class could do a better job in portraying the real environment at an advertising agency. It would require the students to be working far more hours than they could manage — about 70 to 80 hours per week according to Gould’s projection — but the chaotic schedules and constantly changing deadlines give the students a good look at what it will be like in the business world.

“It’s a tough class, campaigns is,” Dr. Gould said. “When it comes to team projects, it’s one that students tend to remember when they’re gone. We try to keep it as modest as we can but they’re going to take what they’ve learned and get a job somewhere because that’s the whole idea.”

The decision was easy, she said: Charles Pearce.

“He is the perfect person to have as the associate director of undergraduate education,” Powers said. “He really understands what students need.”

Pearce started teaching when he was working on his master’s at the University of Alabama, with no plans of continuing in academics after graduation. But the opportunity to teach an advertising class as a teaching assistant changed his career path.

“You could see the light bulb going on, and it’s just a kick when that happens. Just being able to take students from one point and see them get to another point – that’s pretty slick,” Pearce said.

The gratification Pearce gained from his experience led him to teaching. He has spent the last 24 years at K-State helping students in the same way he did as a teacher’s assistant in Alabama.

Much of Pearce's time in his new position is devoted to supporting instructors and helping students. This is Pearce's second stint as associate director.

Pearce originally held the associate director position from 2001-2005 and is now in his second stint. The position became available when Steve Smethers, Pearce’s predecessor, took over as associate director of graduate studies, leaving the undergraduate position open. Powers offered the job to Pearce.

“We’re thrilled to have him back in this position,” Powers said. “It was a very easy transition. It was just a great opportunity to be able to have Dr. Pearce back.”

Bonnie Bressers, associate professor and print journalism sequence head, has worked with Pearce since 1997. She agreed that one of Pearce’s greatest strengths is his dedication to students.

“He sincerely cares about the welfare of our undergrads,” Bressers said. “There are a lot of undergraduates here who all have their needs, and he really does have a concern for the undergraduates and for this program.”

The responsibilities of the associate director position include creating the semester class schedule, coordinating undergraduate advising and providing support for specific student issues.

“I see my position as mostly serving both the faculty and the students,” Pearce said. “If I can do anything to make things run a little more smoothly, I feel like that comes with the territory.”

Among Pearce’s goals in his new position runs a common theme: helping students. His position gives him influence in different facets of the school, and in each of those areas he strives to meet students’ needs to the best of his ability, he said.

One of those areas is instruction. Whether by providing professors ways to improve their instruction methods, supervising assessments of faculty members or just acting as a “cheerleader for instruction,” Pearce said, he wants to do all he can to see students receive the best instruction possible.

“I would like to continue the tradition we have in the Miller School of having first-rate instruction,” Pearce said. “I think instruction is a very important aspect of what we do. It should be that we don’t even need to say that, it should be obvious that is an extremely important part of what we’re doing.

“But getting tenure these days – being an excellent instructor is not enough. You’ve got to have the research and the service, but I think teaching is an honorable profession and we don’t give it enough credit sometimes. First and foremost, we’re here to instruct.”

Another area Pearce plans to focus on is technology. To prepare students for the ever-changing world of mass communications, he said, is essential to give them a taste of the technology they will encounter in the real world.

“Technology has been part of my job since I came here in 1986,” Pearce said. “Part of the job is trying to use our budget as efficiently as we can while serving students the best we can.”

While keeping the school’s technology up-to-date will be a challenge, Powers said Pearce is qualified to deal with it.

“The greatest challenge that he faces is to ensure that we have adequate and up-to-date technology that we’re able to offer in our courses, and to be able to schedule courses in classrooms where we do have enough technology,” Powers said. “But I think the fact that he knows so much about scheduling and technology is just going to make it that much better for the school and for the students. He just has a natural interest for new technology, and on his own he keeps up with the newest software and hardware in our field.”

A third priority for Pearce is the undergraduate students themselves, and this reason is a big part of why Pearce accepted the position. He recounted a story of helping an undergraduate student who was having a scheduling issue. The student was enrolled in 20 credit hours and was going to be forced into taking an extra credit hour because of a problem with transfer credits. Pearce was able to work with the student and other administrators to help the student fix the problem.

“There is a sense of pride and accomplishment when you’re helping people,” Pearce said. “Those are the little triumphs that nobody ever hears about.”

Any doubts regarding Pearce’s qualifications for his new position can be answered by his record and what current and former students say about him, Powers said.

“Dr. Pearce is an amazing teacher, and he has helped so many students with their careers over the years,” Powers said. “We get incredible feedback from our alumni about how Dr. Pearce influenced their careers. He’s so very well respected by former and current students.”

Autumn Shoemaker, senior mass communications major, is one of Pearce’s former students. “Dr. Pearce has a lot of real-life examples to teach from, which is always better than repeating a book,” she said. “I felt really fortunate to take a course from someone so passionate.”

Ultimately, Pearce’s goals come back to educating students.

“Keeping the lights on and everything, that’s all important,” he said. “But I think in this school we give recognition to good teachers, and we have turned out some terrific students. To me, that’s doing our job.”

“I’m usually listening for fires or stabbings and things like that,” she said.

She assigns reporters and photographers to breaking news and writes print stories for the TV station’s Web site.

A part-time assignment editor at KJHR — Channel 2 in Tulsa, Okla. — Podhajsky is the newest employee in the TV station’s newsroom, a place she never saw herself working.

“The weird thing is I hate broadcast, or at least I thought I did,” she said.

Podhajsky graduated from K-State with a degree in print journalism in December 2009 and moved to Tulsa, where her boyfriend lives, with the hope of finding a job writing for a newspaper or magazine.

“If you would have asked me, even just a week before I took this job, if I wanted to go into broadcast, I would have said ‘Absolutely not,’” she said. “But, I really love it here.”

Podhajsky is one of many recent Miller School graduates who are finding jobs —some they really love — in unexpected fields. Angela Powers, director of the Miller School said the recession has forced graduates to be more resourceful and open to different kinds of jobs.

“I think most students understand they have to be entrepreneurial,” Powers said. “They have to have a wide range of skills. They may be doing things in a job they did not think they would be doing four years ago.”

The Miller School, which offers three degrees: journalism and digital media, advertising and public relations — places only a small percentage of graduates in traditional media or communication careers.

According to surveys conducted by the K-State Alumni Association: of self-reporting Miller School graduates since 2006, 18 percent found jobs in public relations, 11 percent in print media, 7 percent in TV broadcasting, 5 percent in advertising and 3 percent in radio. The survey also shows 15 percent of Miller School graduates went into marketing, while 8 percent went into sales and 3 percent enrolled in graduate school.

As a K-State admissions representative, Ryan Newton, is not working in advertising per se, though often feels like he is.

“Ultimately, what I’m doing is I’m advertising K-State to these students and their families,” he said.

Newton, who graduated from K-State in 2008 with an advertising degree, started working for K-State in July 2009. He is in charge of recruiting high school seniors in Johnson County, Kan., and works from his office in Anderson Hall, but spends two or three days each week in the Kansas City area visiting high schools and talking to prospective students.

When he was a student in the Miller School, Newton said he thought he wanted to go into some type of advertising.

“I wasn’t looking for anything like this at all,” Newton said about his current job. “I’m a big dreamer. I have all sorts of crazy dreams. I really wanted to go into product-placement — reading through movie scripts, finding places companies might want to advertise.”

His senior year he was the recruitment chair for his fraternity, Beta Theta Pi, and when the fraternity’s national organization offered him a job as a leadership consultant in Ohio, he jumped at the opportunity.

“I liked my job, but to be truthful I just really missed Manhattan,” he said.

So when a friend told him about the admissions representative position, he applied.

“I said, ‘Oh, this is recruiting. I can do this. I’ve done this before,’” he said.

While his job is not a traditional advertising position, he said his education in advertising — trying to brand, position and sell a product — is part of his job every day.

“A lot of parents make comments like ‘Oh, we can tell you’re an advertising major,’ or ‘It’s obvious you’ve been trained in selling something to people,’” he said. “It’s come in handy more so than I ever would have expected it to.”

Powers said she has found that Miller School graduates are able to find jobs in different fields because of the training they receive at the school.

“The word I’m getting from employers about our students, in the state of Kansas, compared to students coming out of other programs, is our students come out and they are ready to go to work,” she said. “They know their skills. They know their stuff. I don’t think that’s as true of some of the other programs in the state.”

Even the Miller School graduates, who find jobs in their field of study, find them in unexpected places.

A district executive for Boy Scouts of America in Kansas City, Jenna Murphy, does fundraising, marketing, recruiting and public relations for the scouts, as well as organizing and managing a Cub Scout day camp each summer in the Kansas City area.

“No two days are the same,” she said.

Murphy, who graduated with a public relations degree in 2008, never thought she would work for an organization like the Boy Scouts before she came to K-State. She played tennis in high school and for one year at Johnson County Community College, before transferring to K-State, and wanted to find a public relations job with a tennis organization. By the time she graduated, however, the recession was in full force, and job opportunities seemed sparse.

“It was definitely an uneasy time to look for a job, knowing that I spent all this time and money at school and I was waiting to get some payback from that,” she said. “But I was fortunate enough to have connections and to get a good job.”

Murphy got an internship with the Boy Scouts after stopping by their booth at a journalism and mass communication career fair. She interned with the scouts for two summers before taking a full-time job after graduation.

This is the type of networking Powers stresses to her students.

“One thing that never changes is it is not always what you know, it’s who you know,” Powers said.

The Miller School provides job-seeking students and graduates with two key resources for networking: a mentoring program and an online job board.

Students can sign up for a mentor at the school’s Web site, which currently lists about 80 professionals in print, broadcast, public relations and advertising, who are looking for K-State students to mentor.

“The mentoring program is there to help you with your career,” Powers said. “It is not necessarily there to help you find a job. They’re there for you to contact and ask ‘Am I on the right track if I am looking for this kind of job?’ or ‘How’s my resume looking at this point?’”

The school’s Web site lists about 20 job openings and 30 internship opportunities.

As for Podhajsky, a print journalism student who once wanted nothing to do with broadcast, her apprehensions about working for a TV station were quickly squashed.

“There is no competitive vibe at all,” she said. “My very first day everyone was coming up to me and saying ‘Hi,’ even the big-time anchors.”

While she only works three days a week for KJHR now, everyone who has had her position in the past has moved up to a full-time position at the station within a few years. She said despite her previous desire to go into print, staying in broadcast will be fine with her. It wouldn’t be the first time she changed her mind about her journalism career.

“When I came to K-State I wanted to be a fashion journalist,” she said. “It’s kind of embarrassing now.”

“The whole business is in transition,” Bell said. “It’s knowing where to direct your assets to prepare for the future. You have this capital-intensive newsprint edition that takes a lot of people and iron and steel and paper and equipment to get it out to the subscriber. It’s a great business. It’s a mature revenue model, but it’s a great business. But the transition is to the online world, where your infrastructure costs are less, you don’t need the big building and paper and people and heavy metal, but your content needs to be just as good. So, the challenge is to maintain the kind of staff to maintain the high quality on the internet even though you don’t have as large of a revenue base.

“We’ve addressed this by offering multiple products. Individualized products for auto sales with search engines attached to them with all local dealers. The same thing with real estate. We have auction products where we can conduct ‘little eBays’ right in Kansas with subscribers. Those are the kinds of things that we need to pursue to generate the revenue base that we have with the print product.  Eventually there will be another something that we can’t imagine. No one can really foretell. We first saw the prototypes for the iPad and Kindle back in 1987. All that has been around a long time we are just now getting to a point where mass production makes it available. So, who knows? The wireless angle is changing so much faster than we dreamed.”

Though The Salina Journal is tasked with adapting to the changing times like other print products in the industry, Bell describes himself and the Journal as being in a better position than his colleagues.

“We’re doing better than most, in my opinion. We have the privilege of being a part of a group that doesn’t have any debt so at the end of the month, we don’t have to take a whole bunch of money and make a payment on anything. All the resources can go to the operation and to shareholders which means that we have R&D dollars to put in that. We can lose money on something until it gets its feet under itself. The company has been very good about making money available to us so that we can try different things. We’re in a great position. We can watch larger newspapers experiment with different products and when we see what works we can steal the idea. There’s a product out there now that allows newspapers to set up a paid content model by subscription or by metering per article and we can sit there and watch the big boys drop a few million dollars on that. Once it works we can subscribe for a lot less money.”

Bell quickly acknowledges that this shift in the industry isn’t only about being able to stay competitive; it’s also about the readers.

“Our subscribers are pretty savvy,” he said. “If they want to see a PDF of a letter that the county attorney wrote to the city of Salina, then we’ll give it to them. People are really on board with that’s going on.”

Even with all of the possible new directions that the industry is liable to take in the upcoming years, Bell acknowledges that K-State and the Collegian were absolutely essential in helping him learn the basics.

“When I was at K-State I learned the fundamentals. I learned that even if you’re a photographer, you’re still a journalist.”

He started at K-State thinking he was going to go into psychology, but his plans soon changed.

“I took a photo class because it was something I was so interested in and actually ended up splitting the cost of a camera with my roommate,” Bell recalls. One of my pictures ended up outside of the lab on the second floor of Kedzie. The Collegian photo editor at the time, Tim Janicke, saw the picture and looked me up and found me in Haymaker and came up and recruited me.”

Pretty soon Bell found himself working during the day shooting picture for the Manhattan Mercury and the Collegian and working nights in the mailroom at the Mercury. The dual jobs soon took their toll and soon he found himself dropping out of college and working for the Mercury exclusively. It would be another year before Bell found himself back at the Collegian as both a reporter and the photo editor.

“I was just in love with the business. That one visit by Tim Janicke pretty much changed my life,” he said.

Bell describes his time at the Collegian as helpful on a number of fronts.

“It exposed me to reporting, which I never thought about doing,” Bell said. “I soon found out that reporting for a newspaper was addictive, exciting and very educational. The Collegian was kind of like a club without any restrictions on membership. You met such a diverse group of people but they were all committed to the same thing. You met people from all walks of life, all different majors. They were all committed to one thing and that was good journalism, to put out a good newspaper. People wanted to work hard and play hard. They wanted to push the envelope because that’s what that environment was for.”

Bell’s experiences after graduation from K-State have been varied. He spent time at the Arkansas City Traveler, Arkansas City’s daily newspaper. After his time there he was again recruited by Janicke to another newspaper, the Hutchinson Daily News.

“I eventually recruited Bell to the Daily News in Hutch,” Janicke said. “He worked as a photographer for us.”

After venturing into reporting he found himself working for a research and development operation looking into the role of personal computers.

The project, he said, dealt with some of the first attempts of people being able to dial into a news organization’s network and browse their information.

“It was kind of the granddaddy to the online world. We were a little early, though. It was right when the Apple 2C was coming out. We moved to Kansas City with that operation and opened to a second office to try and start a metro operation to see of those densities would help the business succeed. But, again, we were too early and we ended up closing that operation down and I ended up going into the executive training program.”

Janicke recalls Bell being groomed for his eventual role in newspaper management.

“I remember Tom being what’s called a ‘Harris intern.’ It was a program where the members were trained to eventually be publishers.”

After entering the program, Bell became the general manager of The Olathe Daily News and publisher of The Chanute Tribune, where he stayed for seven years. Later, after spending only 11 months as publisher of The Garden City Telegram, the position of publisher became open at The Salina Journal.

“I knew that the Journal would never open up again in my lifetime and it’s, as far as I’m concerned, the crown jewel of the Harris Group. So, the family and I moved up here and we’ve never regretted it.”

Bell became publisher of The Salina Journal on June 7, 1998, and has seen the industry change dramatically during his tenure. Changing trends in the way people get their news and communicate in general are things that Bell and the Journal have had to deal with. According to its website, The Salina Journal has a daily circulation of about 30,000 people and employs 135 people in Salina and the surrounding areas.

Bell’s career has landed him a number of successes and opportunities in the field. He has had the chance to learn many lessons and experience many things in his career as a journalist. But, when asked what advice he would give to any amateur journalists, he only had four words to impart.
“Work for the Collegian.”

Gloria Freeland, assistant professor, has made “seven or eight” trips to Greensburg, Kan., since a tornado virtually destroyed the town May 4, 2007.

“Each time I go, I’m amazed at the progress that they’ve made in terms of rebuilding and infrastructure and just how excited people are in the community,” Freeland said.

She said this May, around the three-year anniversary of the tornado, the town is expected to break ground on a Kiowa County Commons, which would include a community media center.  The media center is expected to feature a 24-hour, open-source Web site.

“They’re talking about having streaming audio and visuals of city council, county commission, school board, sports events, drama events — any kind of event that people are interested in,” Freeland said.

Freeland said she and Steve Smethers, associate professor, were interested in how receptive Greensburg residents would be to having such a news medium — whether they would contribute to it, or whether they would be afraid to contribute.

In December, Freeland and Smethers conducted interviews with three focus groups. They wanted to find out about current online media consumption among Greensburg residents, potential issues related to using and contributing to an open-source Web site and whether the site would be perceived as a viable news medium.

For the most part, Freeland said residents were open to the idea of an open-source Web site but they hoped it could coexist with their newspaper, the Kiowa County Signal.

Freeland and Smethers also worked with Jeff Rake, graduate student, on the project. They submitted their research to the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. If their paper is accepted, Freeland said Smethers would travel to Denver, Colo., to present their findings at the AEJMC conference Aug. 4 – 7, 2010.

Ginger Loggins

Ginger Loggins’s current projects share a common theme: the role of race in the media.

Loggins, assistant professor, is working with Tom Reust, senior in mass communications, on a content analysis, which looks into the methods used by local newscasts across the country to identify wanted suspects. Particularly, Loggins said they are interested in how race comes into play in those descriptions.

Loggins and Reust started the content analysis in January. Once completed, Loggins said they would publish their findings and submit them to conferences.

Loggins also said she has started talking to a colleague at Texas A&M, Srivi Ramasubramanian, about research into the “Obama effect.” This effect, according to Loggins, considers whether Barack Obama’s impact as a positive, ever-present black role model increases or decreases prejudice across the country.

The pair is currently only talking conceptually about what theories and hypotheses to test.  Loggins said they are thinking about showing people photos of Obama and seeing how those images affect their levels and feelings of prejudice. She said she hopes to start the actual research phase by next fall.

In addition to continuing her research, Loggins is planning to participate in the Wakonse Teaching Conference May 27 – June 1, 2010. She said the purpose of the conference is to “improve teaching, work out issues in teaching, share ideas and reinvigorate your dedication to teaching.”

Loggins said she is most looking forward to “a time to think about teaching when I won’t be stressed.”

Thomas Gould

Thomas Gould, associate professor, describes the modern library in terms of a forest.

“If you had a trillion trees and you were trying to find one, wouldn’t you really want to know somebody who knows where all the trees are?” he asked.

Gould is currently working on a book that explores the future of libraries and their role in academic research. He said he thinks there is a significant movement to get academic research into electronic reserves.

“[Libraries] are no longer in the role of getting books and putting them on shelves,” Gould said.

The book is currently in its first stages of editing.

Gould is also working with faculty members Steve Wolgast and Steve Smethers to revamp the school’s Web site — changing its navigation and adding video. He also said more attention on the Web site would be given to graduate students, specifically by advertising to them and reaching them through social networks.

Steve Smethers is interviewed by producer/translator Yuri Osugi.

Journal on the sense of loss small communities feel when they lose their local papers. The report came to the attention of freelance producer Yuri Osugi, who took the research to Nippon Hoso Kyokai (Japan Broadcasting Corporation in English).

“I received an e-mail from the crew about the paper,” said Smethers. “They wanted to talk about media convergence affecting local TV, radio, and newspapers.”

Only one other study has looked at what happens when the interaction between newspapers and the community ceases. The NHK crew of five filmed B-roll and interviews with Smethers on how rural Kansans would accept online publication. That footage became part of a documentary aired in Japan.

“They wanted to take this information and extrapolate it to the situation in Japan,” said Smethers. “To demonstrate how communities suffer with the loss of their newspaper.”

The NHK crew found several key differences in the media atmosphere of the US as opposed to that in Japan. With a larger pool of national newspapers but fewer local papers, Japanese communities receive perfunctory notice in the paper. The abundance of local papers in the US allows for better coverage of community events and politics that is difficult for small Japanese towns to get.

The documentary aired March 20 on NHK. The Miller School is in the process of translating the documentary.

These two groups, journalists and PR officials, work closely, but often adversely in the professional world, creating a tense relationship — one that was evident during the exercise.

Journalism and public relations students, instructors and professionals discuss how they would respond to a deadly explosion on campus during a tabletop exercise at K-State's Community Readiness Communication Conference. About 30 people participated in the exercise, which was in the alumni center. Click the photo for a slideshow of more pictures from the Readiness Conference.

“If there are any journalists in the room who are feeling frustrated by the statement he just made, it is because that’s what PR people do,” said Kimetris Baltrip, journalism professor, about a PR spokesman’s statement during the scenario. “PR people are very good at frustrating journalists.”

This tension between the two groups became a theme during the event, a tabletop exercise, which was the capstone event at K-State’s Readiness Communication Conference in March. During the exercise participants were given information about an emergency scenario and discussed how they would respond as a journalist or PR official.

Deborah Potter, president and executive director of NewsLab, a nonprofit journalism resource in Washington D.C. and the keynote speaker at the conference, participated in the event.

“Everyone is usually very polite at these exercises, but there is a lot of tension,” said Potter, who has participated in many other similar exercises across the country.

In the scenario, K-State’s campus is rocked by a deadly explosion. The dean of the College of Arts and Sciences decided to permanently close the Purple Masque Theater to create space for a new student center in East Stadium. Students and faculty, outraged at the closing of the historic theater, protested, wrote angry letters to the Collegian and sent death threats to the dean.

Then, one morning, a bomb threat note is found at Anderson Hall. “We will not be moved. Maybe this will move you — there is a bomb in Eisenhower Hall,” the note read. The building was swept and no bomb was found.

Later that day another note was found that said there was a bomb in Kedzie Hall. A backpack was left just outside the Collegian newsroom, and when a Collegian reporter took it inside and opened it a bomb exploded, killing three students and injuring dozens more.

Participants were split into four groups. Two played the role of journalists and two played the role of PR officials. Participants were randomly assigned to groups, leaving many of the journalists, like Baltrip, playing the role of PR officials and vice versa.

Each time a new piece of information about the scenario was given to the participants the groups would convene and decide how to respond. Usually the PR groups would start by making an official statement and the journalists would follow with questions.

To complicate the issues, the groups had to decide what to do with leaked footage of the explosion, the names of victims and other information that could not be officially verified.

This was where the two group actions diverged.

“There is primarily tension in terms of when information is provided, not what information,” said Potter, who was in one of the journalist groups. “I think both of those groups want the facts to get out. They want the truth to come out, but a lot of journalists want it a lot sooner than people in public information want to make it available.”

A panel of professional journalists answer audience questions during a discussion about reporting on disasters called Covering Haiti.

Angela Powers, director of the Miller School, participated in the exercise in one of the PR groups. Her group debated when to have the university president address the media after the bomb threat was discovered. The journalists in the group, she said, wanted to have him speak immediately, while the PR people wanted to keep him away from the press.

“Basically the public relations people wanted the president to deal with the positive aspects of what’s happening at the university and they want the public relations people to deal with the negative reactions,” Powers said. “So there was some really interesting debate.”

Joel Pruett, senior in journalism and secondary education, was the spokesman for one of the PR groups. It was a learning experience for Pruett, who is a reporter for the Collegian but had never worked in PR.

“It gives you a better perspective on their side of things,” he said about the exercise,” because they do things a lot differently than we do.”

Mathew Schuler (’09) traveled to Cape Town, South Africa, in the summer of 2009 to work with a team of five other students for 10 weeks. Schuler and his teammates recruited locals to teach them basic design skills, including Photoshop and Illustrator, guiding them in starting a T-shirt business.

“It was intense, there were riots and people blowing up the roads,” Schuler said. “The most rewarding thing was watching them learn and create their own products.”

Schuler applied to All Nations, a local non-profit organization in Cape Town, which needed people with production experience. During his years in college, Schuler acquired experience in Web design and said he wanted to put what he had learned into practice.

The business his team started is going well, Schuler said, and they are starting to receive larger orders of T-shirts.

“It felt great, watching their eyes shine when they realized their work [was] also appreciated by others,” he said. “It was phenomenal.”

Andrew North, junior in public relations, has interned at Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art since August 2009. He is responsible for writing press releases and sending them off to local newspapers, updating the website, creating fliers and other tasks.

“I’m there to publicize what’s happening at the museum,” North said. “It’s been really helpful to put what I’m learning into action. I am understanding things in my classes better.”

Unfortunately, next year’s funding for the position has been cut because of budget cuts, said Martha Scott, administrative officer of the museum. The internship position has been useful in promoting museum events, she said.

“This will mean more work for me and less opportunities for students to gain experience and get paid,” Scott said. “There are many things the intern is responsible for that I will not have time to do.”

Lucas Wempe, senior in mass communications, had his first experience in a television newsroom at an internship in the summer of 2009 at KSNT-TV in Topeka, Kan.

“It really opened my eyes,” he said. “It helped me realize what things I need to do to succeed in this business.”

Wempe said he believes internships are a vital part of the college experience. He has been participating in internships since high school, which he said will give him a competitive edge when looking for a job.

“Employers want to know that you can work in a professional environment,” he said. “The student media offers a great learning experience for students. Unfortunately, it is not always very professional.”

Gloria Freeland, assistant professor and coordinator of the internship program, said internships provide an opportunity for students to decide whether or not these are the type of jobs they would enjoy.

Keith Kennedy, senior in public relations and natural resources and environmental sciences, is interning this semester with the Boy Scouts in Manhattan, where he contributes with the outreach program in elementary schools.

“At first I wasn’t sure if I would really like to work in the non-profit sector,” he said. “My work with the Boy Scouts made me think the non-profit area is a possibility for me.”

Kennedy holds after-school meetings, helps with the organization’s fundraising events and writes grant application letters. For Kennedy, the internship has also helped him in the classroom.

“We are learning blogging and social media in a PR techniques class,” he said. “Using those types of tools help me realize where I can apply things learned in the classroom.”

Jason Strachman Miller, junior in print and digital media, was accepted by the Institute for Political Journalism for an internship program in Washington, D.C. Strachman Miller will be working 35 hours a week, and taking classes at Georgetown University during the evenings.

“Aside from the experience of working for MSNBC.com’s political department, I am very excited to take classes at Georgetown,” he said. “I will be taking an ethics class and a political journalism class.”

Strachman Miller is minoring in political science, so the program fits perfectly with his professional goals in political journalism. He eventually wants to live in the Washington, D.C. area and he said he hopes this internship will connect him to a job after graduation.