Broadcast Education Association 2009

Among the various things I did at BEA 2009--I served my various duties as Student Audio Chair for the BEA Festival and participated in a session called Preparing Students for Careers in Spanish Language Media. Students and university faculty doing creative work should enter something in the next Festival -- see www.beaweb.org. The deadline will be early December.

One of the great sessions I attended was the Writing Division’s Top Papers session. Patricia Phalen of George Washington University presented “Writing Hollywood: Rooms With a Point of View” and Mary Blue, Tulane University presented a paper about Amaani Lyle - who filed a sexual harassment lawsuit because of what happened in the writer’s room at Friends—that she claimed as harassment. Blue talked about fantasy chaining –from Gary David Goldberg, maker of Family Ties, which relates to how a sitcom group of writers works to be funny. Hollywood writers Dean Batali (Buffy the Vampire Slayer and THat 70s Show) Skye Dent (Star Trek: Voyager and The Burning Zone) and Jonathan Prince ("American Dreams" Executive Producer) then evaluated he content of the papers and talked about the realities of Hollywood writing. Dean, for example said his opinion of why Lyle struggled with her job with Friends was that she basically just couldn’t do the job.
Other points made by the writers...
Jonathan Prince worked with Witt Thomas Harris then MTM to learn to be a show runner. Those kind of comedy and drama ‘factories’ don’t exist any more, so that kind of training has to be done by people working in the current writing staffs. Writer’s assistant used to be a secretarial position—now they are expected to be able to write. Lot of discussion about ‘what goes on in the room.’ “Breaking the story” – the idea of what a story line might be in the show. Put it on the board, decide where the act breaks are. If you’re brilliant enough in Hollywood they’ll put up with a lot of extremes (Dean made this comment) Jonathan pointed out it’s all about how the show runner runs things – Don Rio and Blossom – Rio wanted to push people to finish at the end of the day and had a ‘don’t order dinner’ policy so people would srap up and leave. Bitter writers – Skye talked about writers’ relationship with highly paid actors on Friends, for example.
Prince in replying to the ‘outsiders and insiders’ that happens when people join the writing room–‘welcome to the real world—not matter what job you go into, there are those kinds of dynamics.’ More opportunities now for writers than ever—because there are so many more channels. Skye noted writers are on the set making sure the director and writers implement what they created in a TV drama. You have to get a writer’s assistant job to become a writer. Writer’s assistant has to get a spec script accepted.


Then, at a session on news convergence... One example of what they’re doing at Northern Arizona University—Big issue is the tech side—journalism students who have issues with using the digital audio recorder, etc. Difficulties in doing convergence, difference in ‘what is convergence’—student who saw it as having a portal. Instead, focus on good storytelling, not on distribution. Colorado State showed video about doing multimedia. See studentmediacorp.com and my tweet (www.twitter.com/tdemars)

Texas Intercollegiate Press Association

This was TIPA's 100 year anniversary--the organization started with a meeting at Baylor University in 1909. This year it was at the Sheraton in downtown Dallas. The 'under construction' Sheraton. Where some meetings were on the 3rd Floor and some were on the 37th--with only three elevators to get the hundreds of folks up there--and some were across the road.

I've been involved with so many different organizations that I have avoided getting involved with TIPA through my years of university teaching. Plus, I've taught more within broadcast programs and TIPA started as, and continues to lean toward, the newspaper world.

(I'll add more to this later)

Southern States Communication Association

Just a quick note as I depart Norfolk, VA and the Southern States Communication Association Convention. I missed some of the early part of the convention becasue of being involved in so much else, so I could only come over for Friday through Sunday, but it was still a good experience.

In one of the most useful sessions I attended, Ideologies, Pedagogies, and Disciplines Converge to Improve Classroom Communication, Deborah Walker of Coastal Carolina University talked about the research project she and Denise Forrest are doing to show how middle school and high school teachers could be better prepared for communicating in the classroom with students. While this project is focused on grade school, not college or university teaching, and on math, not general subject areas, I found the information to be quite useful regarding what all of us are dealing with in modern education--communicating expectations of engagement and active learning to students, with the expectation that they will be involved with the learning process.

The session I participated in also went well. Jeff South and Marcus Messner of Virginia Commonwealth University joined me in a roundtable discussion of 'new media' issues in the traditional communication curriculum, With me being a broadcast person, Jeff being a print person, and Marcus being a 'multi-media' person, it made for lots of good insight into what Mass Communication programs should be doing right now to update the curriculum.

SSCA has become a much better organization in recent years, so I'm glad I made it to this year's conference--I've attended SSCA for almost 10 years in a row now. Next year it's in Memphis, then 20111 in Little Rock, and 2012 in San Antonio.