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.
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Welcome to the KALW Audio Academy Class of 2017
By Ben Trefny, News Director, KALW Public Radio
Just a quick blog post this week, as I don’t have a lot of time. We’re in heavy production mode for KALW’s semiannual membership drive! But I did want to make sure to share photos of our new Audio Academy class who came in for orientation last week!
From left to right in the group photo, here’s who they are with some of their reporting interests:
Audio Academy Class of 2017.
Beatrice Thomas – Design, development and arts with a focus on queer folks of color
Claire Stremple – Environment, health and transportation
Greer McVay – Politics, pop culture and the family/work/life balance
Josiah Luis Alderete – Latino culture, the Bay Area’s literary history and the 2000s
Cari Spivack – Garbage, urban coyotes and traffic
Boawen Wang – Education, entrepreneurship and music
Jeremy Jue – Bay Area history, senior citizens and refugees
Kanwalroop Singh – Social movements, mass incarceration and the South Asian diaspora
We heartily welcome the new class! This week they’re coming in to take their first seminars and start to develop relationships with their mentors and the rest of the station. Here’s to a great year!
Note from ACE – we also welcome the Audio Academy class of 2017. We look forward to hearing the stories you create based on your reporting interests. Story on!
KALW Audio Academy Grads Rack Up Success in Jobs and Story Telling
By Ben Trefny, News Director, KALW Public Radio
We were extremely happy this week, in the KALW newsroom, to read a national article about our community engagement project Hey Area. It was in the Columbia Journalism Review, highlighting the way members of our audience request stories they want us to report, then take part in the reporting itself alongside our journalists. It’s a great project, and the CJR story, focusing on the work done by Audio Academy graduate Liza Veale (’15) is a nice representation. Check it out right here!
On Thursday, I took a rare trip away from the station to meet with some of our media and community partners in Oakland. I thought I’d share some of what I experienced in a place that’s increasingly becoming a national destination for creative media.
First, I went to Youth Radio, with whom we recently collaborated on the national political conventions. Those weeks, I spoke with Soraya Shockley, for Crosscurrents, about her experiences on the convention floor in Cleveland, along with a dynamic interview about race and the GOP with former Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele. I also talked with Miles Bess about his first experience covering the Democratic National Convention and how network broadcasts weren’t really telling the story he was seeing. For Youth Radio, getting their young reporters before KALW’s audience is a valuable experience, and to hear fresh perspectives that you really don’t hear elsewhere is great for our mission in making truly public media. You can expect to hear more such collaborations in the future.
Second, I headed over to the nationally syndicated show Snap Judgement, where Glynn Washington and his team are redefining the sound of public radio with their beat-driven storytelling. They just hired a terrific new producer there: Liz Mak, who graduated from our Audio Academy in 2014 and recently made her first Snap story about a man discussing his past lives. Snap’s cofounder, Mark Ristich, was noting how extraordinarily good KALW is at training radio professionals and developing talent. In fact, three members of Snap’s current team – Anna Sussman, Nancy Lopez, and Liz Mak – have spent significant time working at KALW’s studios, on Your Call, Radio Ambulante, and Crosscurrents. Who’s next?!
Third, I met up with Martin Reynolds to talk about our partnership with the community journalist training program Oakland Voices. Last year, we initiated work with them and trained half-a-dozen members on how to make radio stories about the arts in their neighborhoods, partnering them up with producers including Chris Hambrick (’15) and Jeremy Dalmas (’14). Four of the resulting pieces aired on Crosscurrents – you can hear them here – and two were part of our live Sights & Sounds of East Oakland show. We’ll be repeating that work with Oakland Voices this year. But Martin and I also discussed the possibility of expanding our community training by conducting a Hey Area project in East Oakland with members of the Oakland Voices cohort. That was an exciting idea, bringing two of our exciting programs together, and we’ll try to see that through.
The final thing I wanted to share is something that is going to directly improve the experience of our next Audio Academy. While we’ve continually refined our program, improving our lesson plans and tuning our curriculum, our students have sometimes felt limited with their access to tools of the trade. We have audio editing software at KALW, but unless our students make an expensive investment and purchase ProTools for themselves, they have to come back to the studios to practice the sound mixing craft. So a couple weeks ago, I called up one of the ProTools founders, Mark Jeffery. He actually was instrumental in arranging the equipment donation that hooked up San Quentin inmates so they could produce the San Quentin Prison Report. After hearing what the Audio Academy is all about, he decided to explore a possible donation. And this week, we received a package containing enough ProTools rigs for every member of the Audio Academy to have their own to use for the year!
That Audio Academy year starts the first full week of September. We can’t wait!
No Summer Vaca For KALW – Learning the Art of Radio Journalism is Full Time
By Ben Trefny, News Director, KALW Public Radio
Our Audio Academy is out of session, right now, but we’re just a few weeks away from welcoming the Class of 2017. They start up on September 6th with a couple days of orientation, but meanwhile we’ve been training many other people at KALW on the art and craft of radio journalism. We actually worked with a full dozen summer trainees who became part of our newsroom for up to four months. It was really a great group of people — I think our years of working with fellows in our Audio Academy has gotten us better at choosing candidates — and they’re going to help the new Academy fellows transition in. If you’ve had the chance to listen to Crosscurrents in the last few weeks, you’ll have heard a lot of their work, and it’s been really excellent.
There’s a lot more to share, so let me get right to it!
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Earlier in the summer, former Audio Academy fellow Jeremy Dalmas (’14) led three high school interns on a formal, six-week quest to make awesome radio stories. Last week the fruits of those labors came through:
Lowell High School’s Gabriel Chen made a smashing story called San Francisco native and Olympian brings badminton up to speed .
Burton High School’s Jacky Chiu recorded some fierce audio for the transportation piece Dragons on Lake Merced.
Immaculate Conception’s Samaria Pineda made a cultural connection with the story For young Bay Area mariachis, music is a family.
It was a pleasure to hear these stories, to work with these students, and to see how well they responded to Jeremy’s teaching. Right on!
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We’ve hired one of last year’s Audio Academy graduates, Eli Wirtschafter (’16), to be our new part-time transportation beat reporter. He did such amazing work with his whole show last year, about new ideas for smarter buses, expensive express lanes and other innovations around the Bay Area, he was a perfect fit for this new job.
That reminds me, too, that we had a lot of final projects from Audio Academy fellows air since I last contributed to this blog. Check some of these stories out:
Geraldine Ah-Sue: Inherited trauma: Cambodian-Americans and the legacy of the Khmer Rouge.
Lisa Bartfai: A new kind of battery.
Luisa Cardoza: The gender-neutral bathroom debate
Tammy Drummond: From tough neighborhoods to life saving health careers.
Truc Nguyen: Sound healing.
What a brilliant bunch of people! Every fellow in our Academy worked so hard last year, and that’s really paid off with the acquisition of a marketable and meaningful skill-set, as you can hear. We’re very proud of them all.
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Then there’s this: I got a lovely note a few weeks back, regarding a story Liz Pfeffer (’14) made about : How homeless women deal with their periods.
Hello KALW Studios! My name is Liliana Ascencio and I am a Merced College Student. I have recently realized the seriousness of the struggle homeless women face every month with the coming of their period. I understand that these products are very necessary, yet limited. In combating this issue I have organized a branch in my community of Merced, CA for The Homeless Period. I aim at collecting as many feminine products, such as pads, tampons, ect. and distributing to as many homeless shelters around my area as I can. I have read your article on this very issue and would like to use it in hopes that people will realize the seriousness of it, just as I have. Thank you for your time. It would be great to hear back from you.
I got back to her. And KALW will be part of her work educating people about this important issue!
Similarly, I got a call from somebody from Delivering Innovation in Supportive Housing (DISH) in San Francisco, who found me after hearing The Intersection, a podcast series from David Boyer (’14). Considering the extensive work we’ve done on homelessness, she was looking to partner with us in recording oral histories alongside a team of documentarians at a supportive housing complex in the city. Ultimately, there will be a presentation at the main branch of the San Francisco Public Library, and we’ll air some of those conversations on Crosscurrents. We’re very invested in providing this kind of public service
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Finally, we’ve been taking steps to do bigger and better things with our website at KALW and our social media outreach. One of the things we’ve done is create a better landing page for people interested in learning about our Audio Academy. Doesn’t that make you want to check it out? Do it! Just click here!