ACE Spectrum
ACE Spectrum
Ace Spectrum is about you — the ACE Learning Centers.
It’s a quick sharing of ideas, inspiration, opinions and best practices among our continuing education organizations.
Please join the conversation.
It’s Been a Year of Great Storytelling at KALW, With More to Come in 2019
By Ben Trefny, News Director, KALW Listener Supported Public Radio
It’s been a really remarkable year for KALW‘s news department. We’ve provided more training than ever before, including work with more than 100 high school students in San Francisco, Oakland, and Richmond; we’ve added an audio reporting program at Solano State Prison in addition to the one we’ve offered at San Quentin State Prison; and we’ve trained nearly two dozen aspiring journalists within our working newsroom. All that, plus we were honored with more awards for our journalism than we’ve ever received before.
I want to give a huge “thanks” to the Association for Continuing Education, the California Arts Council, Cal Humanities, the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education, and all the organizations and individuals who have helped us make our public interest journalism model possible.
We’re very proud, and very tired, and we’re ready for a little vacation!
Before we go, we wanted to share some perspectives from Kevin McLean, one of the students in our Audio Academy training program, and a Fulbright-National Geographic Digital Storytelling Fellow who wants to be able to communicate science through effective storytelling. Here’s where he’s at:
As we wind down this calendar year, it seems like an appropriate time to reflect back a bit. We’re only three months into the Audio Academy, but our weekly workshops are wrapping up as we start to get a handle on the mechanics of making radio stories. No one’s kicking us out of the nest yet, but we’re all stretching our wings with our first feature stories.
One of the things that I’ve enjoyed working on in these last few months has been writing for radio. I come from a background in science, where I pretty much have to delete every bit of myself from my writing. But when you write for the radio, someone is actually going to have to say what you wrote, and some of the things that I instinctively put on the page sound nuts when read aloud. Writing in my own voice (and then actually using it) has been a refreshing change. Hearing my voice is still a bit horrifying at the moment. Baby steps.
I’ve also learned to appreciate a hard deadline. One of our tasks in the newsroom is to help with the afternoon newscast. We take a look at any breaking news, write it up, and then it gets read on the air. The whole process happens in a couple hours or less. There’s no time to be too precious with words, you can’t agonize over story structure, it just has to be clear and (as mentioned above) sound like a human when it’s read out loud. It’s fast, it’s fun, and you definitely get to check something off on your to-do list.
Interviewing people has been another helpful but not always comfortable adventure. I’ve found that I get nervous in the same way as when I took an improv class a few months ago. I told a friend that I was really struggling with juggling everything – listening closely while also thinking ahead, and also coming up with something to say or ask that makes sense. “You mean general conversation?” he asked. And yeah, I guess that’s all it is, but it still gets me a little wound up. I’m not a total shut-in that never talks to people, but I will admit that in conversation I do tend to space out a non-zero amount of the time…a habit I am now diligently trying to break.
Finally, spending time with my Audio Academy class has been a huge plus. They changed the format a little bit this year, so that we are all together once a week for our workshops, which means we really get to know each other and go through this learning process together. In addition to just having people who are sharing this experience with me, I have a group of people to provide feedback, suggestions, and encouragement.
I’ll leave it at that for now, but I’m definitely looking forward to what the next six months have in store.
The rest of us are, too! And considering how good Kevin actually is at writing for his voice, and at conducting extraordinary research like this, I know there are plenty of amazing stories on the way. And by the way, everybody should really watch this very personal one that Kevin made with National Geographic. It’s a beautiful thing.
Here’s to many more in 2019!
Listen Up – Current Audio Academy Students Stories Go On Air
By Ben Trefny, News Director, KALW Public Radio
This blog post is a real pleasure to write, because it includes info about the myriad training programs currently running through KALW, all of which are made possible through the support of the Association for Continuing Education. Read on!
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First off, I’ve been talking with Kim Kelling, Director of Content & Community Partnerships with WFSU in Tallahassee, Florida, about how training programs are incorporated into the daily work of our news department. She was super impressed and, since her station has received a grant to learn more about how to work better with the community, they’re sending a team of people out to the Bay Area to learn from us, Youth Radio, and KQED. They’ll come by KALW the afternoon of Wednesday, January 9, to meet with me and others at the station, see what we do and how we do it, and then observe our weekly Audio Academy seminar. Should be fun, and it’s certainly flattering that they sought us out as one of the nation’s exemplary public media training programs!
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Speaking of the Audio Academy, a bunch of cool stories from the current class and alums aired on KALW, and elsewhere, last week.
First off, below are some of the first newscasts to be read live by this year’s Audio Academy fellows. Lance Gardner, Pria Mahadevan, Kevin McLean, and Lisa Wang were on our air, live, for the first time. It’s a nerve-wracking, and important, part of their training, and they got it done!
Listen to Lance Gardner –
Listen to Pria Mahadevan –
Listen to Kevin McLean –
Listen to Lisa Wang –
We reaired the award-winning series Unearthing the Green Revolution from Kanwalroop Kaur Singh (’17) on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday.
In a new piece we also aired on Wednesday, Asal Ehsanipour (’18) traveled up to Butte County to get a firsthand look at how people are trying to help each other out after the Camp Fire.
Our transportation reporter Eli Wirtschafter (’16) had a very dynamic and entertaining Q and A with Hana Baba on Thursday about electric cars and HOV stickers.
And Bo Walsh (’18), along with Jenee Darden and Tarek Fouda, is getting a lot of fascinating artists on the air as part of Sights & Sounds. This week on Crosscurrents, we aired interviews with muralist and tattoo artist Mel Waters and actress Nilaja Sun, plus, on Sights & Sounds Weekly, we heard an amazing interaction Jenee had with singer Kim Nalley. (Be sure to stick around to the end of that one for the impromptu scatting!)
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That wasn’t all Bo got on the air. He had his first national piece! It’s about the Stanford band, and it ran on the perfect day — the day of the Big Game, Stanford’s annual tilt against Cal — on NPR‘s sports show out of WBUR in Boston, Only a Game. Check it out!
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Some more training to talk about with teams in the field:
– Holly J. McDede and Marisol Medina-Cadena (’18) taught a workshop about media literacy and engagement at Galileo High School last week. They recorded more than 30 commentaries from students about how they interact with media. It’s part of a bigger project we received funding from Cal Humanities for, which will include workshops at Burton and Lincoln High Schools as well as our summer high school internship program in 2019. Lots more on that down the line.
– Jenee and Chris Hambrick (’15) led a training boot camp with Oakland Voices alumni over the weekend. That’s a foundation for our Sights & Sounds: East Oakland work, in which the reporters we’re working with are paired with producers, photographers, editors, and engineers to tell stories generated by East Oaklanders about their community. That partnership has resulted in the community journalism award across all media from the Society of Professional Journalists of Northern California in two of the past three years! Lots more about that to come, too.
– Eli and Jessica Placzek, who work alongside Andrew Stelzer at Solano State Prison, had the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation head of rehabilitation come in to observe our training program and be interviewed by some of the guys with whom we work. Pretty amazing, when you sit back and think about how far that program has come in the last year. And guess what? A professional photographer was there, too, so we’ve got great behind-the scenes images of our studio inside the prison and the program and its participants in action. Check it out right here.
Thanks to everybody who is making all of this great work around the Bay Area happen!
Matt Martin Honored By KALW, But He Asks Everyone to Continue His Work This Giving Tuesday
By Martha Sessums, President, ACE
Full focus from Matt – donate to KALW on Giving Tuesday.
After a respectful evening of praise for being a “guiding light” at KALW for 17 years, Matt Martin, ex-General Manager of the public radio station, asked everyone to “Help Us Continue Matt’s Work” by donating to the radio station today on Giving Tuesday.
To donate, text VOICES to 44-321.
That would be a typical Matt response. Driven by imagination to look at KALW and its community to see how it can be better.
I met Matt around six years ago when he proposed that ACE support educational programs via an ACE Learning Center at the radio station. Both organizations (KALW and ACE) use Federal Communications Commission (FCC) assigned Educational Broadband Spectrum, so we had something in common. ACE started supporting Burton High School students learn about radio journalism, but then Matt’s imagination took over. He pitched Audio Academy, a nine-month program of teaching and mentoring students in the future of community journalism. I don’t think even Matt knew what a great success it would be.
Audio Academy is the only radio station-based classroom for community radio journalism. It has provided KLAW a national profile unknown for a small public radio station. National Public Radio was so impressed with the program that it asked for the teaching syllabus. Not sure if Matt ever gave it to them, but Audio Academy has not been recreated anywhere else.
It takes more than a syllabus to be successful, and Matt drove for excellence in teaching with a mentor strategy. Every Audio Academy Fellow is assigned a Crosscurrents news room Mentor who works one-on-one with each student. Learning, with all its mistakes and opportunities, becomes personal. Driven. From the heart and soul. Complete the program giving the very best on both student and mentor sides.
The result: leadership careers have been made in the public radio and communications community. Graduates have secured jobs at national and international radio stations. Alumni have created radio programs and podcasts that have grown to national syndicated status. They’ve taken the KALW skills of telling a story in audio form to a higher level. One graduate used audio to enhance a story of immigrants crossing the sea to Greece which was rewarded with an Academy Award nomination. The background sounds of the boat, water and human destress added to the drama.
Audio Academy graduates have even earned jobs at KALW in the News Department, continuing the high level of audio story telling as editors, producers, announcers and reporters diving deep into the Bay Area’s diverse and complex community.
The evening honoring Matt was full of stories from colleagues. Gummy bears at staff meetings. Personally signing thousands of thank you letters to each donor, often with personal notes. His predictable style of dressing, sometimes imitated on Halloween. His quiet, strong leadership that allowed each employee to feel empowered to step up with something imaginative and new that would make a difference. Even an award certificate from the San Francisco School District thanking Matt for “helping us step into the future.”
It’s about imagination says Matt Martin. And donating to KALW on Giving Tuesday.
Matt responded in his usual low key, humble style. He talked about his belief in the “creative power of community” and in imagination as a driving force for good.
“With imagination, you see something clearly in your mind, then take steps to create it,” he said.
The stand-up round of applause was appropriate, requiring Matt to take an encore return to the stage because the crowd wouldn’t quit clapping.
But even at the very end, he didn’t give up.
His final words – “Donate to KALW on Giving Tuesday. Text VOICES to 44-321.”
All KALW and Audio Academy supporters – let’s do it.