Nightly newscast prepares students to enter the world of bradcast journalism

Undaunted, Garcia hops into his red Saturn and heads out to Las Cruces International Airport. He’s been assigned to do a story on damage to an airport runway caused by a recent presidential entourage. Gadi Schwartz, a fellow broadcasting major, has been assigned to help with the story.

Arriving at the airport, Garcia finds his worst fears are true. The entire airport staff is out of the office at a meeting.

Garcia makes the best of the situation by getting a variety of shots of the damaged runway. He arrives back at the KRWG-TV studios in Milton Hall at 4:50 p.m. and checks in with News Director Gary Worth. Worth hands him a script for the story and tells him to just lay down 35 seconds of his footage for a voice-over report – a report read by the anchors that contains no interviews.

“Sometimes things don’t turn out the way you want,” Worth tells him.

Garcia and Schwartz take their tape into a room filled with editing machines and get to work. To their left, two students are putting together the evening’s sports report and to their right, two students are working on a story about the morning’s Las Cruces City Council meeting.

Worth sits down with Garcia and Schwartz at 6:10 p.m. and makes a few minor changes to their tape. The finished tape is added to the box of tapes for the evening’s newscast at 6:20 p.m.

“It’s a lot of work for 30 seconds,” Garcia says.

Nevertheless, he’ll be back tomorrow to help produce the Tuesday newscast.

Good training ground

Garcia and Schwartz are among hundreds of aspiring television reporters who have gained experience working for KRWG-TV, the public television station for Southern New Mexico that is based at NMSU. The station has been on the air since June 29, 1973.

NMSU students have been involved with KRWG since it went on the air, and in 1985, the station became only the second one west of the Mississippi to broadcast a nightly news program produced and anchored entirely by students.

Today, KRWG remains one of fewer than 20 public television stations in the country to have a student-anchored newscast.

“Only a handful of PBS stations even do local news, much less student newscasts,” says Sean McCleneghan, who served as head of the Department of Journalism and Mass Communications from 1982-1994. McCleneghan, who remains a professor in the department, credits the student newscasts with giving NMSU a tremendous reputation for students interested in studying broadcast journalism.

“The best kept secret in the western United States is that NMSU is the place to go for broadcast journalism,” McCleneghan says.

About 30 to 40 students a semester work on various aspects of News 22, from reporting to anchoring to production. Most students start the middle of their junior year, giving them a year and a half of experience before they graduate. Some students begin working for the station earlier as volunteers. The students work under the direction of several professional staff members such as Worth, who also teach NMSU’s broadcast journalism classes.

Thanks to KRWG-TV, McCleneghan says 90 percent of NMSU’s broadcast journalism students secure jobs after graduation. NMSU graduates can now be found at stations across the country, including cities such as Austin, Albuquerque, Denver, El Paso, Jacksonville, Phoenix, Portland, Sacramento, San Diego, Seattle and Tucson.

Award-winning show

A display case in the entranceway of Milton Hall holds some of the many awards that KRWG student newscasters have won over the years. The student newscast won its first award in 1987, just two years after it started. Many others have followed, from organizations such as the Associated Press Broadcasters Association, the New Mexico Broadcasters Association and the Rocky Mountain Collegiate Media Association. The award Worth is proudest of is a regional Emmy Award that Hugo Perez ’94 and Moses Shumow ’01 received in 2001 for El favor de los Santos, a documentary on the role that religious images have played in the lives of people in the American Southwest, Mexico and Latin America. Perez now works full time for KRWG and Shumow works for production companies in Boston that produce documentaries for the Discovery Channel.

Ron Salak, who has served as general manager of KRWG since 1992, says his goal is to produce the nightly student newscast year-round. An endowment bearing the name of ABC-TV reporter Sam Donaldson has been established to raise funds for this purpose.

The station also is trying to raise funds to complete a conversion to digital television mandated by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

KRWG began broadcasting a low-power digital signal on April 24, 2003, that has a range of about 30 miles. The station is in the process of building a 145-foot tower on the top of “A” Mountain that will support a full-power transmitter. The station should be broadcasting a high-power digital signal by late 2005.

The conversion to digital means that KRWG will be able to broadcast four or more signals within its assigned channel frequency. Salak envisions that in addition to its current program schedule, KRWG will broadcast 24-hour children’s programming on one of the additional signals, an instructional education service on another, and possibly a New Mexico version of C-Span on another.

The total cost of digital conversion – including transmission equipment and production equipment – is estimated at $8.6 million, of which the station has raised $6.7 million. The KRWG newsroom was completely converted to digital cameras and editing systems in February 2003.

Although Garcia found the new editing machines a bit nerve-wracking his first night on the job, he is grateful for the opportunity to learn them.

“It should make the job hunt a little easier for me,” he says. Garcia has already landed one internship with the NBC affiliate in El Paso and hopes eventually to become an anchor for the Spanish network Univision.