I completed my internship at KTOE AM 1420 Information Radio and Radio Mankato this spring semester 2009 under the supervision of news director Pete Steiner.
Although he assures me I probably learned more from my experience at KTOE than I could have in class, I wish I had taken his adjunct broadcasting class in preparation for my internship. I think I learned a great deal from Pete Steiner throughout my internship and without his guidance, I do not feel the experience would have been nearly as valuable. What impressed me the most about Pete were his people and communication skills. At every event or meeting I attended with Pete, everyone wanted to talk to him or shake his hand and everyone had great things to say about him. I felt very honored and fortunate to work with someone so revered in the industry and in the community.
I feel Media Writing I & II were beneficial classes to my internship experiences. In these classes, I learned the basics of AP Style and the news gathering process. During my internship, I put these lessons into practice by attending campus and community events and conducting interviews. At KTOE, I also learned how to select news stories based on location, importance, and relevance to each station's particular audience at Radio Mankato. What might be interesting to KTOE listeners might not be as interesting to listeners of KFAN, Radio Mankato's sports station. A lot of the newsgathering came from selecting stories from the AP wire, and not actually going out and conducting interviews, researching, and writing stories, however. I wish I had more writing opportunities while I was there and I wish the stories could be more in-depth.
I also attended regular news briefings at the police station with the local media and city council meetings in Mankato and North Mankato with Pete. I think it was beneficial being able to meet with representatives from various news organizations and then see how they handled the same stories differently. Many college students might not necessarily read those particular articles or sections, or even the newspaper at all for that matter, but I came to understand that these were some of the most important stories for a local news station in any form. I think it was also beneficial networking with those individuals for when I continue with my job search.
I also sat in and participated in Pete’s midday program “Talk of the Town.” During this program, Pete brought in various city officials and members of the community, including the City Commissioner, an Abe Lincoln impersonator and the Mankato area figure skating club. I helped arrange some of his interviews for this program, including local author and MSU English professor Nicole Helget.
At Radio Mankato, I got to know Nathan Harrington, a KEYC TV meteorologist and a morning talk show host on KDOG at Radio Mankato. Through him, I learned that Max Jensen, a former high school classmate of mine, also works at KEYC and I will hopefully be getting together with them over the next few months to put together a resume tape to apply for television news positions. Nate also taught me that in mass communications it is important to be multi-disciplined.
During my internship, I went back and forth between KTOE, the AM information station, and KDOG, the FM variety station. Overall, I preferred my experiences at KTOE since I wanted to focus on gaining more experience in the journalism field, but both stations offered valuable experiences. For the beginning of my internship, I attended the KDOG Morning Show with Sarah and Nate, where we mostly sat around and made fun of celebrities on the air. I did not really enjoy this or see the importance of it, and wished I were working on news that is more serious. The station eventually brought back Brad Steele and let Nate go, and I guess the station’s consultants preferred just having Sarah and Brad in the morning, without me or the other intern, which was fine by me.
At KDOG, I followed Jeff Lang, also known on air as "Stunt" or "Stunt Monkey," around and contributed to random tasks. On several occasions, I designed registration boxes for various contests to be placed throughout the Mankato community. When Jeff first handed me the assignment, I asked where I should work on designing the logos and information to be placed on the boxes and asked if any of the computers had Adobe InDesign. Jeff just laughed at me. Instead of being able to apply my knowledge gained in Desktop Publishing and the Editorial Process, I designed the contest registration boxes crudely in Microsoft Word. We also handed out t-shirts and other prizes at the Minnesota State University Walk for Women's Athletic Scholarships and at a career fair.
Jeff also showed me how to use Cool Edit for voice tracking to record programs when the stations are not live on the air. I watched him voice track on numerous occasions for different stations at Radio Mankato, but when I asked if I could voice track anything for the air he told me no. Radio Mankato had recently lain of four staff members in addition to the receptionist, and Jeff said if I were to take on too much responsibility as an unpaid intern, I could make some of the other staff members look expendable.
This sentiment was echoed by the evening KTOE news personality, Julie Kroon, when I asked her if I could record one of her short news updates. Pete Steiner regularly let me select stories and record news updates for KTOE and KFAN, but Julie was also concerned that this would take away from her hours since she was not a salaried position, or make her look unneeded.
Julie did call me one afternoon, however, because she had to take her pet to the vet and could not make one of the Mankato Area Public School District Superintendent interviews. I sat through the interview with the first of three Superintendent candidates, each interview to take place at the Intergovernmental Center on a a different day, and took notes and asked questions along with Joe Spear from the Free Press and many concerned teachers and parents. I then transposed those notes and wrote a brief radio news story on that interview.
During the midday, I often enjoyed sitting in the KDOG studio with Mike McKenna discussing the ins and outs of the radio industry until he, too, was let go by the station. McKenna had been working within the radio industry and at Radio Mankato for over 20 years. I am not sure what McKenna is going to do now, but he had mentioned pursuing sports announcing and that he was the voice at the Moondogs and MSU Women's hockey games.
Through McKenna, I learned that Duane, the Program Director, started out at Radio Mankato mowing the stations lawns. He was eventually asked to fill in for a position and then came to host his own programs. When Clear Channel bought out Radio Mankato, Pete Steiner stepped down from the Program Director position to become the News Director and Duane became Program Director. Radio seems like a difficult industry to crack into, even in a small town like Mankato, and I am not sure that it is something I want to spend too much time devoted to pursuing.
In the afternoons, I often sat in on and participated in Trish Johnson’s 4:10 p.m. program, "Talkin' the Beat." Each day, Trish as different guests from the community come in and discuss their organization. I largely viewed this program as a public service and it was often one of my favorite programs to participate in. I learned a lot from Trish’s conversational interview technique.
Every other Wednesday, Christopher Crock, the speech and debate coach at Gustavus Adolphus College, would come in with one of his students and discuss everyone's greatest fear, public speaking, for the program "The Spoken Word." During the section segment of the program, the student would then read a piece they had prepared for competition. I did speech and debate in high school and found the college level entries and competitions very interesting, and something I might consider going to grad school for in the future.
One afternoon, the GAC team was unable to make the show and Trish asked me to fine a person or organization of interest and conduct the interview. Conveniently, my boyfriend is the MSU MFA creative writing program and their second year reading was coming up the next week. My boyfriend and another friend of his from the program came in and I interviewed them about their upcoming readings, as well as the latest issue of the Blue Earth Review, of which they are both editors. Then, during the second portion of their segment, I had them read some of their original work, much like in the scheduled programming of "The Spoken Word."
Every Thursday, Mankato Police Commander Amy Vokal and another officer would come in and discuss issues in the community. These segments were interesting because they were often situations I had learned about earlier in the day or earlier in the week at the briefings with Pete Steiner at the police station. On one particular occasion, we discussed what came to be known as "The Mall Brawl," an altercation occurring in the River Hills Mall and parking lot. We also discussed the increasing incidence of khat in the southern Minnesota area when a member of the Minnesota River Valley Drug Task Force came in for the program. I also attended a live remote with Trish at a bank opening.
While I think my internship was important and valuable, I preferred my experiences at the MSU Reporter. Last year, I served as the assistant news editor, which amounted to much more than 120 hours per semester. I feel like I had much more responsibility as a serious member of the Reporter staff, and I think I learned just as much from Bronson Pettitt, Derek Wehrwein and Rachel Heiderscheidt as I did from the Radio Mankato staff. In the future, I think the Department of Mass Communications should consider accepting Reporter editorial positions for internship credit.
I am glad I learned other computer programs and other forms of mass communication, but overall I learned that my passion is for print journalism. Pete Steiner encouraged me to continue with my interest in print, and even to contact Features Editor Amanda Dyslin at the Free Press.
I think it is unfortunate that when you look at the staff page for KMSU it does not consist of any MSU students. If there is no broadcast branch of the department, I think it would be great for students to learn radio right on campus. I know many colleges and universities, including St. Cloud State, the University of Minnesota and the University of South Dakota have campus radio stations that are primarily student run, much like the Reporter is student driven. KMSU has shows like “The Best of Broadway,” which boasts having been on air since 1984—before most MSU students were even born. This does not make any sense to me and has been a frustration of mine, and many other students that I have talked to, since I started going to school here.
During the last few weeks of my internship, I came to the realization that I wished I had kept a blog of my experiences. I think this would be something interesting for the department to consider requiring. Last spring, I took Ellen Mrja’s “Journalist U” honors course where I kept this blog for a semester, and I easily could have continued to document my internship experiences here, but it did not occur to me until it was too late. I think keeping a blog would make the essay much easier instead of trying to remember all the things I did over the course of a semester and could even be used in place of the essay. I think this would also be an interesting way to incorporate new technologies and aspects of mass communications into the program.
