What some of your fellow journalism students are doing

Students Determined To Do Serious Reporting

By Diana Marszalek

TVNewsCheck, April 22, 2013 2:41 PM EDT

There’s a student revolution underway at Kent State University – and, no, you’re not having a flashback.
Journalism students at the Ohio school — indelibly linked to Vietnam-era unrest — are taking on a new incarnation of The Man: TV news.
Gearing up to rock the business by doing the kind of work “people pay attention to,” the students are rising up against local TV news they consider “pretty sad,” with reporting that only scratches the surface of issues and an abundance of fluff.
“I care about the weather, but I don’t care about it for 15 minutes like I saw the other day,” says Andrew Jardy, a graduating senior and part-time production assistant at Fox-owned SportsTime Ohio.
Jardy says he’s not discouraged by studies showing TV news viewing is on the decline. “I feel like if people started doing investigative reporting that maybe those numbers would change,” he says. “I could do work that would make a difference and people would pay attention to.”
Jardy and his cohorts are already hard at work at accomplishing their goal, producing investigative reports on subjects they say have been “ignored” by commercial media, which they hope will be models for the work they will soon do as professionals.
Many of the investigations focus on college athletics, although they take on the local media, too. “It's reporting that's not being done by the local newspapers or TV stations,” says journalism professor Karl Idsvoog.
Take a look at:

• Grad student Shanice Dunning’s investigation into who receives full-ride scholarships from Kent State. She found the university awarded 122 such scholarships — which cover everything from tuition to room and board — to athletes and just two to academics.

• Megan Closser and Dunning’s visits to local TV stations to uncover data behind the political ads they run. One thing the students found: “Cleveland television stations don’t like television cameras.” That story was done in a response to a challenge from newsman Bill Moyers.

• A computer-assisted reporting class’s Cars for Coaches project examining the car policies of each Mid-American Conference athletic department and several other NCAA Division One universities in the region.

• Students also found that the largest portion of the Kent State athletic department's budget comes from the same place: fees charged to the academic students.

• Idsvoog’s contribution, saying local reporters contribute to scandals in college athletics by cheerleading instead of doing their jobs.

• Jardy’s story showing that it’s the families of college athletes, and not the schools they play for, who are largely responsible for paying for sports-related medical costs.

This article can be found online at: http://www.tvnewscheck.com/article/66993/students-determined-to-do-serious-reporting.