One of the truisms in our field is that you never know where you will find yourself, and what you will be doing there. When planning my career, the idea that I would become a specialist in producing programs about China was never a consideration. Yet Shanghai 1937, the documentary that Evgenia Vlasova and I produced last year, has now been broadcast more than 154 times by public television stations across the United States. It’s been sold to broadcasters in France and Germany too…
Another example is digital journalist Gillian Kemmerer. She used the skills she learned at NYFA to build a new career. She was an on-air anchor/presenter and director of US programming for the financial news service Asset TV. She then received a fellowship to study Russian, in Russia. She has been reporting from Moscow for several months now. She says:
“I interviewed Olympic/Stanley Cup champion Alex Kovalev for Sport Express, and it made the front cover! We chatted for nearly two hours on everything from how video games almost stalled his career to a near-return to the ice last month at age 45. The piece has sparked responses from Darius Kasparaitis and many others. Check out the English language story here.”
Next stop on Gillian’s 2019 world tour is Shanghai. (That’s the Oriental Pearl Radio & Television Tower behind her in the picture below.) I recommended one of my favorite restaurants…
One of the nice things about learning digital broadcast journalism in New York is that the city is one of the media capitals of the world. In fact, you can be walking down the street and discover the six o’clock news being shot at one of the local TV stations. No secrets here… an associate producer hands the anchors some last minute copy, while the weather correspondent is in another part of the studio. He then materializes on the main set, just in time for a little back and forth with the anchors, who then lead into a story about saving money on gym memberships.
Finally, our January short-term students arrived at New York Film Academy (NYFA) last week. Which means this week they are producing their first story. After classroom exercises with camera instructor Daniel Hernandez and TA Fabiola Torres — where they learned what all those numbers on the screen mean — they were off to meet one of downtown New York’s favorite celebrities, the Fearless Girl…
