ACE Spectrum

KALW Audio Academy Students and Alumni Make Impact Around the Country, and Find True Love Too

Posted by Martha Sessums on Apr 11, 2017 in ACE Learning Center, ACE School Report, Continuing Education | 0 comments

By Guest Blogger Ben Trefny, News Director, KALW Public Radio

As our current Audio Academy class continues to work on features and develop their whole shows to present in the next few months, I’d like to share some nice highlights from our fellows and alumni:

– Geraldine Ah-Sue (’16) produced a story, last week, for our engagement project Hey Area, in which our reporters find answers to questions our audience has about the Bay Area. In this case, it was something of a ghost story, exploring where Oakland’s Lake Merritt’s “necklace of lights” came from. Spooky!

– Truc Nguyen (’16) reported a very informative story about the history of the Americans with Disabilities Act. The piece aired last Wednesday, on the 40th anniversary of an historic Bay Area sit-in. Timely!

– Cari Spivack (’17), who made a very creative and thoughtful piece about how the popular Bay Area name “Portola” should be pronounced, pitched the story to The California Report, a statewide program, and had it accepted. Awesome!

– Jeremy Dalmas (’14), KALW’s cost of living reporter, just finished reporting and recording a story for NPR’s All Things Considered about San Francisco’s financial justice director. We’ll share the link once it reaches the air. Represent!

Speaking of Jeremy, he’ll be the lead instructor for our summer high school internship program. He also taught students last year, to great reviews and outcomes, so we’re very excited about what’s to come. We’re currently accepting applications through this link.

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This month we say goodbye to two significant contributors to KALW’s team.

Julie Caine has helped oversee the Audio Academy as our managing producer, and she’s been one of our great teachers for several years. She has taken the position of Executive Producer of Audio / Product Development & Innovation at Al Jazeera +, where she joins Audio Academy alumnus Raja Shah (’16).

Ted Muldoon started with us as a summer volunteer in 2014 and then became an Audio Academy member with the class of 2015. He’s taken a job as an audio producer with the Washington Post. Ted created the sound for many new KALW products, such as Sights & Sounds and FSFSF, and he’s been a regular contributor to Crosscurrents.

We’re sad to see our colleagues go, but we’re very exited about the work they’re moving on to do.

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Another one of our colleagues, Leila Day, who’s been a tremendous mentor and trainer in our Audio Academy, is currently teaching students in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, at the renowned Transom workshop with legendary public radio producer Jay Allison. She shared this story with us about the project Audio Academy alum David Boyer (’14) produced:

“Students shared one of their favorite pieces they ever heard and a student said The Intersection, because she was fascinated on how the story was structured, impressed at how the reporter got people to open up, and amazed about how much she learned.

“Students eagerly jotted down the podcast name and Jay Allison said, ‘That’s the type of reporting that we all need to strive for. To create something that sticks with you.'”

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Lastly, here are some thoughts from Audio Academy alumna Alyssa Kapnik Samuel (who married our former sound engineer Seth Samuel soon after graduating with the class of 2014):

“Since I left KALW, I’ve worked as an independent reporter. I produced two stories for CPR (the Colorado NPR station) and won a national PRNDI award for best Arts Feature for one of those stories – find those here; I produced a story for KQED about ice cream sandwiches – find that here; I photographed Joe Biden for WABE (an NPR affiliate in Atlanta); and I’ve done a few independent photojournalistic series with both photos and text: one about foster youth who’ve aged out of the foster care system – find that here – and one about refugees from around the world living in a small town near Atlanta – find that here (http://alyssakapnik.com/documentary/#refugeeportraitproject).  I’m hoping to mount the refugee photographs and interviews in a show this year.

“I also work as a full-time professional portrait and wedding photographer – find that work here. I have a 5 month old baby, an awesome radio-and-music-producing husband, and I live in a wonderfully quiet and beautiful neighborhood in Atlanta.

“KALW taught me to dig deeper in interviews, and how to create a narrative. I gained a huge amount of confidence working at KALW, and really felt that I wasn’t a reporter until I spent a few months there. It made me feel empowered and taught me to really root my work and research in the local community.”

KALW Audio Academy Becomes Role Model for Journalist Training and Community Story Focus for KZYX

Posted by Martha Sessums on Apr 6, 2017 in ACE Learning Center, ACE School Report, Continuing Education | 0 comments

By Guest Bloggers Ben Trefny, News Director, KALW Public Radio; and Jeff Parker, General Manager, KZYX Public Radio

I recently met Jeff Parker, the new general manager at KZYX public radio up in Mendocino County. He’s a really nice guy who’s dedicated to making the most out of his small station through education and collaborations. It makes sense, then, that he’d be extremely intrigued to hear about KALW, where our training programs and partnerships have forged a strong, community-oriented foundation for our station.

I’ve now had a few conversations with Jeff about what we do, how our program has evolved, and the ways in which KZYX might be able to adapt some of our training techniques to their own work. It will be exciting to see how Jeff can lead his station to grow and better serve Mendocino County, and I’m happy to help however I can along the way.

I asked him to write up a few thoughts on our conversations, and he was happy to share them with you for our blog post. Check them out!

I’ll freely admit, I didn’t know a whole lot about KALW before I visited on a sunny recent Friday. I’d just heard that KALW was affiliated with the San Francisco city schools, had the unenviable task of competing with one of the strongest public radio stations in America, and had an extremely thoughtful, creative and resourceful management team. I didn’t expect to come away from my visit bubbling with ideas for transforming our scrappy news operation at my station, KZYX, which serves the forested, sparsely populated vastness of Mendocino County on a shoestring budget.

I’m new to community radio, having just returned from 26 years in China — much of my adult life — as a news agency reporter, startup publisher and sustainable rural healthcare advocate. So I’ve been learning my new KZYX general manager role by visiting fellow public radio stations and meeting their managers. Our KZYX team of six works out of a small converted house in Philo, a hamlet of 350 set amid the oaks, redwoods and grapevines of the Anderson Valley, so I was awed by KALW’s bustling and newly renovated digs at Philip and Sala Burton High School. But talking with longtime General Manager Matt Martin was like reuniting with a long-lost twin. No need to explain my existential fears of pledge drive donor fatigue and the possible evisceration of Corporation for Public Broadcasting funding, the duty to broadcast without interruption from aging alpine transmitters being hammered by record rain, snow, hail and winds, and the challenge of producing news for 90,000 residents spread across a poor county the size of Delaware and Rhode Island with just three part-time reporters. Matt was a fount of ideas and reassurance.

I only met News Director Ben Trefny briefly, but when Matt briefed me about the Audio Academy, my mind started racing. Though I’d trained scores of journalists while expanding the Reuters Chinese Language News Service, I’d had the support of a multibillion-dollar news giant. Our KZYX budget is less than $600,000. I’d begun exploring collaborations with Mendocino Community College, but was discouraged that they had neither a journalism program nor any campus news media. No radio or TV station, no newspaper. To launch an accredited journalism curriculum would take years, I was told. So I set my sights low, thinking we’d attempt some pilot broadcasts from the college, and maybe a technology collaboration with their healthy recording arts program.

KALW’s Audio Academy changed all that — a model for rolling news production, journalist training and expanded community service up in one exciting package.

We’re still in the planning stages, but Ben and Matt are helping to shape this vision: A collaborative KZYX Academy based at Mendocino College, with young trainees being mentored by our experienced news producers and guest lecturers, gathering stories from county and town governments, businesses, cultural institutions and the daily flow of news from the county seat, Ukiah, their own farflung communities, and everywhere in between. Their reports would add valuable minutes to our daily newscasts, enriching our most important community service by sharing their own work over our KZYX airwaves, garnering marketable skills and civic experience in the process. We’ll need to raise grants and donations to make it work, but, given the slow implosion of newspapers and other commercial news media, and the fake news-rich chaos of social media, we see a hands-on, real-world training program as a unique opportunity to reinforce disciplined, ethical newsgathering as a pillar of civic and economic development and government accountability.

KZYX and KALW already are exploring fresh collaborations in news and listener engagement, and we will welcome Audio Academy trainees to Mendocino to share experiences and help illuminate our biggest stories: the transformation of the cannabis economy and the highest rate of homelessness per capita in America. There’s so much learning to go around, a chance to bring rich benefits to both of our audiences. We can’t wait to get started!

Cross Cultural Friendships Built Via Technology, Food and Music at OIHS/ACE Learning Center

Posted by Martha Sessums on Apr 5, 2017 in Uncategorized | 0 comments

By Guest Blogger Ms. Aeisha, Parent Teacher, ACE Learning Center, Oakland International High School

This year has been full of wonderful community-building moments in our parent classes at the ACE Learning Center at Oakland International High School! Our students, who come from all over the world, build cross-cultural friendships with each other as they use technology, learn English, and cook food together using produce from our gardens.

Technology is such an important tool for our families to learn how to use as they learn to read and write in English, as they enroll in community college classes, and as they navigate their new society. We try to do our small part in supporting our parents as they adjust to life in the United States.

In partnership with the Alameda Food Bank, our families get access to fresh food including fruits, vegetables, milk, eggs, and rice once a month on campus. Our family support nights bring in other local partners, like the Oakland Technology Exchange and Alameda County Health Care, to help our families get computers, Internet access, and health insurance, so that they can truly embark upon achieving the American Dream.

Last week, we had a treat as a local musician and volunteer came to visit our parent classes to perform on the banjo (click on the link) IMG_1307, that most American of instruments, bringing in a piece of Americana to our classroom full of immigrants. The parents loved it and we had a rich discussion about music around the world and other similar stringed instruments that could be found in the countries where our students are from.

In our next update, we’ll hear from parents themselves about the impact that the ACE Learning Center has had on their lives and about the work they’re doing in class.