Thanks to a $2.85 million grant from the New York City Council and former Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz ’70, the Brooklyn College Television Center, now in its 50th year, has upgraded its production and editing facilities. The new high definition TV studio will allow students majoring in television production and broadcast journalism access to the same type of equipment that industry professionals use. “The studio offers our students an opportunity to work with state-of-the-art equipment in a specialized environment,” said Dean Maria Conelli of the School of Visual, Media and Performing Arts. “There is no better way to prepare them to move from an academic setting to a professional one.” Located in the basement of Whitehead Hall, new studio includes a high-end rack room with a large storage capacity, a new teleprompter, a Chyron machine to generate digital broadcast graphics, 16 new editing stations, and a new high definition switcher. Each monitoring unit in the control room consists of 16 windows to better manage camera work. “We have gone from having a three camera, tape-based facility to a five camera, all high definition tapeless facility,” said Jeanine Corbet, operation and production manager of the center. “The new studio was designed by an outside firm in close consultation with the TV center’s staff and the department,” said Television and Radio Chair Stuart MacLelland. In 2012, the department received a Student Technology fee grant for an additional $100,000 for the multimedia laboratory and newsroom. The Department of Television and Radio has been garnering accolades recently. In April, three students of the department’s Summer Broadcast News Institute (SBNI) — Michael Gomez ’13, Anthony Tart ’13, and senior student Nickesha Johnson — received a College Emmy award for the best broadcast news program for a production that aired last summer. Taught since 2010 by veteran investigative reporter Barbara Nevins Taylor, the six-week capstone course for broadcast journalism students has long been producing top quality newscasts that air regularly on a non-profit cable station. The Society of Professional Journalists also bestowed its Mark of Excellence Award to the SBNI for the regional competition in the category of Best All-Around Television Newscast. Russell Midori ’13 won the Society’s best television feature award “Our goal is to graduate students who understand the social, political and economic impact of media on society, and have a skill set to develop content and deliver news, information and entertainment to audiences using all forms of traditional, contemporary and emerging technology,” said MacLelland. “Students who think critically about media and can apply advanced production techniques learned in our facility should have a rewarding professional career.”
