A newsroom and immersive studio in the Communication Arts and Sciences Building will open on Nov. 8 for students to work on stories for MI First Election, which is political coverage for the School of Journalism. It will close again after a day to finish work on it until January, when the newsroom and immersive studio will open for the spring semester.
The newsroom and immersive studio were put into place to allow students to get real experience of what the environment will be like after college, said Troy Hale, a specialist in the School of Journalism and Department of Media and Information.
Hale was one of the people who originally thought up the idea of the newsroom. He said four years ago, the School of Journalism took part in MI First Election, where students used the WKAR studio as a newsroom to cover the presidential and local elections. He said the event was successful, so they wanted to be able to build a newsroom to get that same type of experience every day.
“It’s a controlled environment, but it gives them real experience,” Hale said about the newsroom. “When students are doing their news projects now, they are doing them in a classroom and it feels like a class. The idea of getting them to forget about class and pretend like it’s real is going to make their stories a lot better.”
The newsroom will be open on election day for students to work on election coverage. Almost all of the journalism skills classes and some of the journalism seminar and lecture classes will participate in MI First election. Their stories on the election will be uploaded to the School of Journalism’s website, where there is a special tab for MI First Election.
“MI First Election is not just about young people coming of age to vote, but it is also about new United States citizens and their first time to vote,” Director of the School of Journalism Lucinda Davenport said.
Journalism and Residential College in the Arts and Humanities sophomore Maddy Wheelock is participating in MI First Election for her Journalism 200 class. She will be reporting on who people in campus are voting for, and transcribing her classmates interviews inside of the newsroom.
“I think this (the newsroom) is definitely a resource that I’m going to be using that will give me experience,” Wheelock said.
The newsroom will have areas for writing and editing stories, photography, graphic design, radio and broadcast. The immersive studio will be used to learn about interactive media, Davenport said. It will have a motion capture system, which has a green screen to change the background. The motion capture has 24-48 cameras, which can layer on different types of skin to the people standing inside the system. There is also a third smaller room that connects the two, which will be used as a multipurpose room.
These rooms will be used by classes within the College of Communication Arts and Sciences, but students who are working on stories or projects and need to use any of the equipment can also use them. It can also be used for those who are not in the college, like reporters who are doing stories on the campus and student organizations.
“One of our goals is to always be preparing our students to be leaders and visionaries of the industry,” Davenport said. “So if we are going to prepare students to be leaders and visionaries of the industry, how wonderful it is to have state of the art equipment to do that, coupled with such expert and internationally known faculty.”
