West Texas A&M University once again participated in the Global News Relay. The Global News Relay, which ran its first broadcast last year, is birthed out of the University of Salford at Media City in the United Kingdom.
The production was written by members of the News One Broadcast class, The Prairie student newspaper staff and The Eternal Flame student magazine staff. The show was recorded in the WTTV News One studio at WT. This is the second year that WT has participated in the relay.
There were a few differences from last year. For example, last year each school ran its segment for two hours and this year they ran for only 15 minutes. This year there was a running theme throughout all the segments as opposed to last year where each school selected whatever they wanted to showcase. The theme for the year was poverty, so every school used their 15 minutes as they seemed fit as long as the stories were centered-around the theme of poverty.
Unfortunately, WT had a hiccup when recording its part of the Global News Relay. The show was shot the Friday before the Wednesday deadline, however it turned out that there was a problem with the audio on the recording. So Tuesday night, after WTTV’s News One broadcast, the students rallied for a reshoot.
Advertising and Public Relations Major David Duenes was the Director and oversaw the project with the help of The Prairie student newspaper Editor Megan Moore who played the role of Executive Producer.
“Knowing that you lost a day’s worth of work and you have a couple of hours to reshoot was kind of stressful,” Duenes said. “But with the help of this awesome team we’ve built between The Prairie and News One I knew we could do it.”
Some of the students in the News One class were able to experiment with positions that they don’t usually get to do in the classroom during this shoot such as live talent. Broadcast Electronic Media Major Miranda Perez was one of the few who were able to be in the position of Anchor.
“It was exiting, there was a lot of hard work put into the show,” Perez said. “I’m glad I was apart of it because not everyone gets the chance to be apart of something so awesome and global.”
There were other students such as Electronic Media Broadcasting Major Malcolm Montgomery who is neither in the News One class nor affiliated with The Prairie or The Eternal Flame.
“It was a lot of fun, though, there was a lot of pressure,” Montgomery said. “To be able to change on the fly was pretty different.”
The Global News Relay featured 12 different schools from around the world and has since run the broadcast.
