Judge Memorial journalism students learn trade from PBS NewsHour

Friday, Jan. 16, 2015

SALT LAKE CITY — Judge Memorial Catholic High School has been named a PBS NewsHour Student Reporting Lab for the 2014-15 school year. About 80 schools nationwide have been selected for the NewsHour program, including two other Utah schools, Brighton High School and Entrada High Draper Campus.

JMCHS was discovered through a national writing project that Chris Sloan is involved in; Sloan is JMCHS’ AP English, media and digital photography teacher. He attended a PBS NewsHour workshop last spring to learn the technical requirements for the program, he said. “The video quality has to be professional and the stories have to be really good,” he said.

Two types of stories are covered: Rapid-response stories, like the Michael Ferguson story about the black teen who was shot and killed by a white officer in Missouri; and long-term stories such as guns in schools and the legalization of gay marriage in Utah the students are working on. 

Judge Memorial was featured on the PBS NewsHour with a story about Ferguson and when NFL player Ray Rice assaulted his fiancée in the elevator. 

They also were featured when PBS asked the question ‘Should professional athletes be role models?’ For that segment, senior Carlos Avila did a good interview with Ramy Ahmed, a JMCHS junior and football player, Sloan said. “Carlos went into the locker room, composed a good visual with good lighting, and put together a good story.”

Three Judge Memorial students also put together a piece over the Christmas break about giving back that was aired on PBS NewsHour. “I didn’t assign it; it was an extra project,” said Sloan. “They shot it on their own time and stayed after school to edit it.” 

The three senior students, Paul Oliver, Caroline Pribble and Olivia Jacobs, are talented and dedicated, and they finished the piece 10 days early, which in the PBS world was pretty impressive,” said Sloan. “This is their first year of filming and the piece was considered among the other schools who teach broadcast television all day long; I don’t really teach broadcast TV, and there are a lot of hurdles to jump through to get to the point to be featured.”

Developing a relationship and working with PBS “is not about building up the students’ self-esteem,” said Sloan. “They are kind of tough on the students.”

The students use Google Skype and email to communicate with the PBS NewsHour people. “We’ve hung out with PBS anchor Hariharan Sreenivasan using Google Skype,  to pitch ideas and run stories by him,” said Pribble. “We also talked to Thai Da Silva, who is in charge of the PBS reporting lab, and she keeps us on track; we’ve had a lot of help from all of them.”

The students have had a video editor review their videos and email them ways to improve. 

“Sometimes their criticism is harsh, but it’s worth it,” said Pribble. “We worked so hard on the giving back video and they emailed us back right away with seven things to fix, but we realized what they said was valid.”  

“We are doing this for the first time, and don’t know that much about it,” added Oliver.

Sloan likes participating in the PBS NewsHour reporting lab because “I think the teenage voice and youth perspective needs to be part of mainstream media,” he said. “I think they have a lot of valuable things to say and are capable of producing just as good of quality to get to that point where they can be part of the conversation. My goal for them is that people don’t look at their work say ‘Oh, that’s good for high school students,’ but they say, ‘that’s good.’”

“I find working with PBS NewsHour rewarding,” said Pribble.