By Brendan O’Reilly
Through plastic sheets hanging from the ceiling in Dempster Hall, the base of the School of Communication, are two new rooms designed to upgrade the building and enhance educational opportunities.
One of the rooms will be a multimedia classroom, equipped with 20 student computers and a teaching station, as well a projector that is MiniDV, DVD and VHS ready. The classroom will mainly be dedicated to broadcast journalism classes, said Sybil DelGaudio, dean of the School of Communication. “Broadcast journalism students had this tiny little room, 146, and they didn’t have a place to meet,” DelGaudio explained. Now they will have their own place, she said, adding that it certainly will not be limited only to broadcast classes.
The second room is tentatively titled the converged newsroom. “The converged newsroom, I hope, will be for every major in the School of Communication,” DelGaudio said.
The room will feature four stations for editing on Avid software, three plasma screen televisions, two Macintosh computer stations and full access to the University’s network. Network access was lacking in the WRHU newsroom, one of the rooms which previously occupied the converged newsroom’s space. WRHU will have a station in the converged newsroom to produce “Newsline,” “Hofstra’s Morning Wake-up Call” and its sports radio programming.
WCBS’ Long Island bureau desk, which is currently stationed in WRHU’s main office, will also be a part of the converged newsroom.
DelGaudio said WCBS has agreed to help the School of Communication with finding internships for students, scheduling speakers and opening up their studios for tours in exchange for their space in the newsroom.
“It will be a functioning room that we hope will have a buzz going on all the time,” the dean said.
She added that the converged newsroom is a realization of her goal of academic departments coming together to create synergy.
“We should try to utilize all of the resources of the School of Communication,” DelGaudio said. “Whether they’re faculty, administrators, students, equipment, radio stations, television shows-whatever they are-to have all students be able to work together.”
The converged newsroom is mostly encased in glass and the floor was raised to make room for wired connections to run under the tiles. There are two entrances, both of which are wheelchair accessible. Room was made for a new corridor, so students would not have to walk around WRHU’s studios to reach the newsroom.
While many joked, or actually believed, that the construction in Dempster is a multi-million dollar project, DelGaudio gave a much smaller figure.
“It’s probably going to be somewhere in the neighborhood of $500,000 altogether. That includes construction of the two spaces,” she said, adding that the price includes labor costs. “The Hofstra folks were so booked up, because there’s a lot of construction going on on campus. So, we went to an outside architect and an outside contractor.”
She broke down the number further, explaining that $100,000 of it will be spent on equipment and computers.
Approximately 60 new network drops were installed for the new rooms, said Joseph Valerio, chief video engineer for the University. Students will have access to iNews, Avid Newscutter and Pathfire, all professional software for news gathering and disseminating. There will also be seven racks for video work tied into Dempster’s and WRHU’s routers, he said.
Since WRHU is without a newsroom during the construction, the station has been mustering together “Newsline” in its main office, General Manager Bruce Avery said. However, it is a small sacrifice for what he expects the results will be.
“We’re really excited about it, because it, in essence, collects where information comes though,” Avery said. There will be multiple news collection and dissemination outlets in one place, thus providing more preprofessional development for WRHU participants, he added.
“The is the way the world is going in terms of news collection,” Avery said, adding, “I really do think this is the right thing to do at the right time.”
The converged newsroom will be under the direction of Mo Krochmal, an assistant professor in the department of journalism, media studies and public relations. Krochmal was among the first class of Columbia Graduate School of Journalism students that could declare “online” as a concentration. He has 12 years of experience in online journalism and is an original employee of NYTimes.com, the Web site of The New York Times.
He said he foresees the newsroom will be a space to innovate and think about the future. “It’s like a vase,” Krochmal said. “The flowers are the work the students will do.”