Right On Tynes | There is a collective lack of appreciation for student journalism and the pertinent pre-professional experience route that Communications majors take at King’s College. Whether it’s purposeful or sheer obliviousness from the administration to the students it involves, it needs to stop.
Let’s make this simple: the appreciation level at King’s College for Mass Communications majors is at an all-time low. But hear me out, it’s deservedly so.
When you attend an institution with less than 2,500 students and the most popular major at the aforementioned is Accounting (10% of the population) and then the perceived “important” majors are Athletic Training and Physician’s Assistant and so on, it’s easy to know coming in that a major like Communications isn’t overly valued to the community.
But that’s not the issue.
The issue becomes when those students, the ones who are dejected to one floor on top of a business school, go elsewhere because, you know, there are only about four or five teachers who teach in the department – you know, since two left and haven’t since been replaced and others aren’t full time – then that’s where the appreciation should continue.
When you take a major as free flowing as journalism or communications, the important work that’s done in the four years of an undergraduate experience isn’t in the classroom. It’s the pre-professional time that matters most.
So, it’s more than disheartening to find out that the students you share a classroom with don’t know how useful student journalism can be to their collegiate experience.
It’s more than disheartening when upon graduation, those students – close to a majority – have nothing to show for their four-year struggle through academia. It’s a wonderful waste of over forty thousand dollars annually.
But one of the local proprietor’s of this rhetoric is WBRE’s Andy Mehalshick, a homegrown product. And, if he hadn’t worked in a radio station at Wilkes University, he wouldn’t have had the tools to become the area’s most watched television reporter on the local NBC-affiliate.
“When I started,” Mehalshick said to a broadcast newswriting class at King’s last week. “I covered county commissioner meetings. They were pretty tame stories. But it didn’t matter, I still had to cover and get the facts right.
“Any school,” he continued. “With a great [Communications] program – King’s has a great program, Wilkes has a great program – you have to take advantage of that.”
And that’s really what it is: an advantage. Is it a problem that professors aren’t pushing students to student journalism forums at the college more frequently in the first two years of college? To a point, yes.
But it’s more the fault of those students who don’t want to take the aforementioned advantage to better themselves in the process.
What Mehalshick learned in that dreary, bleak Wilkes radio station helped him cover the Eric Frein case, the one that reporters from every publication in the state came to Northeast Pennsylvania to cover.
Student journalism is the same sparkplug that led a Florida College President to say that his students aren’t entitled to report about the college in their student newspaper.
It led a student government association at Auburn University to steal papers from the racks because an editorial was running criticizing the campus’ shuttle bus service.
And, ultimately, it’ll lead a student to a job. You know, the thing we all come to college to achieve at some point in time?
“I’m not perfect. None of us are perfect,” Mehalshick said. “I tell a lot of our younger journalists coming it, it’s like with any profession, the more experience you get, the more hands-on, real time battle, in the battle, it makes you a better journalist.”
The overarching theme here is a simple concept. Student journalism, at it’s core, is the most brilliant experience any communications student can have. Point. Blank. Simple.
It leads to better experience in the field, it makes other sects of the major – if one isn’t pursuing specifically journalism or broadcasting – diverse in their skillset and it readies the mind for the task that will come outside of the classroom or during freelancing opportunities of any kind.
Mehalshick’s training in a Wilkes radio station began to mold him for cases like the Frein fiasco. If he wasn’t fact-checking the small stuff in the 80s on South River Street, he couldn’t handle the big stuff forty years later.
So true as it has been nationwide for decades. The best school, in my opinion, for journalism right now – Michigan University – doesn’t even have a journalism program. They have a student newspaper, which has produced some of the best sports writers in the country.
Student journalism projects on campus – whether it is a newspapers or radio stations – aren’t just a four-year experiences. They mold skills for a lifetime.
“Get an internship.” Mehalshick said. “I tell that to a lot of our younger journalists…We have interns at our station tha tleft before the news of the Frein case broke that said: ‘ugh, we would have went if we were here.’ Well guess what? We would have taken you.”
Hopefully in six months, when I traipse across that stage at the Mohegan Sun Arena and grab that piece of paper that tells the world I exist, I can do so knowing my fellow students have achieved what was necessary, individually, within their major.
King’s produces , roughly, less than five students a year that go on to newspapers, television or radio stations, or even get into this side of the communications field.
So, who’s next to grab the reigns?
Tyler R. Tynes is a college senior from Philly studying mass communications. His email address is TylerTynes@Kings.edu. HIS OPINIONS ALSO DO NOT EXPRESS THOSE OF WRKC OR ITS STAFF. “Right On Tynes” appears every Friday. Follow him on Twitter @TylerRickyTynes