'inside Nau' Spotlight - Mark neumann

>>Theresa Bierer: Glad you could join us for Inside NAU. It's Mark Neumann, the director of the School of Communication in the spotlight. >>Mark Neumann: In the School of Communication we have a nice blend between theoretical, critical, and practical skills. If you take a look at the kinds of programs we have that range from journalism and electronic media and film, where students are working with the latest technology. To our photography program which not only teaches the dark room skills, the traditional chemical darkroom skills, but also digital flow and digital manipulation of images. To our visual communication program, which prepares students for work in graphic arts, computer software designs and computer website design. We have a wide range of practically oriented skills, at the same time we have a number of courses that focuses on theoretical concepts of communication, courses that provide students with a critical knowledge of how representations are made, whether those are advertising representations or representations that exist in the culture that become a source of critical analysis for young scholars who are looking to understand how communication works. So the academic training we have in the program is vast and wide, what we do is we try to provide students not only with the practical skills that get them jobs in different kinds of industries. But we also provide them with a more well-rounded academic base for understanding how these images work, what are the traditions behind them, what are the new ways we might be thinking about creating representations of culture, representations of products, representations of film, video, journalism, all of these things are currently changing right now. In our program we are really preparing students for a whole new realm of digital multimedia skills as well as the kinds of resources for thinking in new ways on how to make meaning. Technology is changing in our culture and one of the things I think that really forefronts that in the school of communication is our student media center. In the student media center we have students who are producing videos for broadcast on a television program, our nightly news television program. We also have students who are learning the latest software for creating websites and commercial applications of graphic art. We have students who are taking television cameras and laptops out and doing on the spot reporting journalism. Broadcast journalism is changing a great deal and we find that more and more people are very self-contained and independent in their ability to go out and cover stories, so we are training students to use those new tools and use their new skills. And to be able to provide reports to the public that take place on multi-platforms, things like websites, but also in the more traditional venues like broadcast television and audio recording. The student media center has evolved very rapidly and it is in a response to the kind of changes that are going on in the industry. We have a number of different media that students work in, they work on the Lumberjack Newspaper, which is now a part of the school of communication. They participate in the production of NAZ Today, which is a nightly television live broadcast of news for Flagstaff and the local region. We also have them producing content that will appear on the NAZ Today websites as well as jackcentral.com. We also have, some people don't know about this, is the UTV62 which is a student run television station where the students do all of the programming and they also produce original material for that programming. Then we have KJACK radio of course which provides students with opportunities for doing music formatting but also news and public affairs reporting, talk shows, those kinds of things. So the student media center is really this great laboratory for students to explore all of the different kinds of media that they may have opportunities to work in once they leave their college education.