You're Fired!

This article is beneficial for our entire class considering we are all now involved in campus media. I think a policy manual is a great idea and absolutely necessary for any type of campus media. If the rules and regulations are written down, there are no excuses why everyone shouldn’t be following them. It also makes firing someone much easier because there is no grey area of what is right and what is wrong. It is also true that an initial screening process would be helpful in campus media groups. Requiring all potential members to go through a screening process ensures that we would have a dedicated, hard working group.

This article also discusses ethical issues that campus media groups may face. Newspapers often have problems with plagiarism, but we should not have to worry too much about plagiarism at R-TV. What we do have to worry about at R-TV is the ethical content of the videos being streamed. We must ensure that there are no hurtful messages being portrayed such as racism or any other type of discrimination. Members who violate any ethical codes or any rules and regulations in the policy manual should be warned and then fired if it is a repeated action. Overall, discipline is key to a successful campus media group.

1 Newspaper, 3 Students

The article "1 Newspaper, 3 Students" by Mary Ann Pearson was very helpful for our community engagement class. She said the three skills to revitilizing a struggling program are recruiting, training, and retaining skills. I am working with Rollins Television doing promotions, however as of now there is nothing to promote because R-TV does not have any media. The most important skill for R-TV right now is recruiting. Mary Ann's 7 steps to recruiting are great ideas to get people involved in R-TV. I thought the first tip was one of the best ones, which is to "create an atmosphere that is fun and creative." Right now, there is not much to the R-TV atmosphere. If we could make the R-TV office more fun and exciting like the WPRK office than maybe we could get more people to want to be involved. Another tip I thought was a great idea was to advertise in the school newspaper. Our promotions team had already talked about using eachother's media groups to spread the word about events, but I think we could use the Sandspur and WPRK to spread the news that R-TV is looking for more people to get involved.

Once we finish the recruitment process for R-TV we can focus more on training and retaining. The most important thing in training and retaining is to keep it fun. People are volunteering to be here, so they don't want it to feel like a job. Being part of campus media should be a fun and exciting activity.

R-TV Promotions Proposal

As we all know, Rollins Television is pretty undeveloped as of right now. The most exciting scene that has played on the Rollins television channel in the past year is a fish swimming across a fish bowl. It is time to create some more excitement and get R-TV into action! Hopefully with the help of our community engagement class, we can help develop some media to air on R-TV. Even if it is just picture slideshows with music at first, anything is better than staring at a fishbowl all day.

The great thing about starting from scratch is that we can create a lot of excitement throughout campus because it will be something new. We discussed having a “re-branding” campaign for when there is enough media to grab an audience’s attention. We can poster signs around campus stating, “R-TV is making a comeback!” We can list all of the exciting new media that will be shown on R-TV. I think we should have media of sporting events, and other campus events on R-TV because students will be interested to tune in if they might see themselves on television.

In class we discussed having this campaign take place for a month or two and once R-TV is ready to broadcast again we could have a “re-broadcasting party” on Mills Lawn with the inflatable projector screen, popcorn, and a ribbon cutting ceremony.

We can also use our contacts in other media departments on campus to promote the “re-broadcasting party.” We can have an article in the Sandspur and announcements on WPRK. I think this class can make a huge difference in the campus media if we all work together.