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At the games

Ball State multimedia team prepares for the Olympic spotlight

As the beginning of the 2012 London Summer Olympics quickly approaches, Ball State students and professors are preparing for the big trip and the publicity it may bring to various departments on campus.

This trip will be the first time that Ball State has represented itself on such a national and global scale.

Ball State journalism instructor Ryan Sparrow is the man behind the immersive learning trip that is hosting students from all multimedia outlets. Sparrow wanted to spark energy into students and get them excited about their career choice's possibilities.

"I think one of the reasons, when I started this, I kind of wanted to do something big and splashy with our new curriculum and an immersive class that was - for a lack of a better word - it was just kind of cool," Sparrow said. "I think because the journalism industry is kind of in a bad transition state right now, I didn't see quite the enthusiasm from students that I used to see within the journalism department [when it comes to] thinking about the future and thinking about the cool type of profession that working in the news industry can be."

The idea Sparrow had been developing was a long time in the making. The trip started out with a call-out meeting available to anyone to test whether or not there would be any interest, Sparrow said.

"Literally in the beginning ... the only thing I could tell you about the Olympics class [was] 'let's go to England during the Olympics and see if we can find some stories,'" he said. "We didn't have any contacts, we had kind of a small game plan about where we were going to stay and the basic logistics of it, but aside from that we didn't have anything."

The story itself is something Sparrow said he believes has the power to excite journalism students about the field they will be working in one day.

"I think it's going to give us a little bit of a shot in the arm as far as: these are cool projects we can do, this is possible, it's not just covering poverty in Muncie, covering unemployment of Indiana, and those are cool stories too but they're not sexy," he said. "For lack of a better word, they're not sexy and I think that by showing that journalism can be cool and can be fun, that's why people get into journalism."

Students who are a part of the team see this as the experience of a lifetime. Senior public relations major Kait Buck has gotten the chance to work with media organizations including WTHR and The Chicago Tribune, and finds the experience she's gaining priceless.

"For me personally, anytime you can get real world experience like this, it's amazing because employers take that and that's so much more credible than what you do in a classroom," Buck said. "It's not just for a grade, it's for people to actually see."

Buck also acknowledged this is not the average immersive learning experience for Ball State or any other university covering the Olympics.

"We are a full run news agency reporting on the Olympics, working with media partners [and] working with athletes so I think it makes the university look great and I know they've gotten a lot of recognition from this trip already and they're using it in a lot of their promotional materials," she said. "Basically, this is the kind of thing they want to do for students."

The team that has been assembled to cover the Olympics consists of designers, feature reporters, photographers, public relations specialists and sports reporters. Heading the features section is Ball State journalism instructor Colleen Steffen. Steffen said she and her team had been working on preparations since Spring Semester.

"We worked on interviewing past Hoosier athletes and we worked a lot of the Hoosier Olympian angle while Chris Taylor's team focused more on developing relationships with current athletes," she said. "My team is really going to kick into high gear when we're there because we're going to be in charge of a lot of the enterprise stuff on the street, so we're hopeful that springs up around the Olympics."

Helping out the team of Ball State students and faculty is Chicago Tribune graphics producer and Ball State alumnus Alex Bordens. Bordens will have an editorial role to help out with the adviser roles, Sparrow said.

"I called up the alumni of the Chicago Tribute about the possibility of using some of our work and I think as things got bigger and bigger, I realized I wasn't going to be able to dedicate the time and attention really needed to do the job the Tribute was really asking for us to do for graphics," he said. "It was at that point that I thought how great would it be if I could just ask them to send along one of their editors with me who also happens to be a Ball State grad and so I basically offered them a deal that if they would send one of their editors over, that I would pay for his rooming over here."

Steffen said having someone like Bordens along to help out offers an entry point for students to get connected with professionals in their prospective field.

"The whole process also involves trying to find networks for the students and people in the field who can give them a leg up," she said. "To have him there the whole time will be really good for the students and not just for the work."

With the idea becoming a reality, university faculty are beginning to wonder what this will mean for the future and how this could effect individual departments on campus. Dan Waechter, interim chairperson of the journalism department, said he thinks the immersive project can create an opportunity for a larger interest in the university, especially from prospective students.

"I think we suddenly have something we can show them or we have this 'cr+â-¿me de la cr+â-¿me' experience that we say 'hey look, here is a project that you can engage in when you're a junior or senior' and we start sharing with them information on the professional partnerships that we've developed that have generated a lot of excitement," Waechter said. "I'm not saying we don't have good students, we've got terrific students. But the opportunity to keep bringing more and more terrific students in, that's really exciting."

Waechter said he thinks that Ball State's role in the Olympics and the Super Bowl, hosted in Indianapolis, both have potential to create bigger opportunities moving forward.

"This is going to open the door to even more and more ideas," he said.

Chris Taylor, an instructor of telecommunications sports, has played a role in getting the trip in motion. Taylor also felt that Sports Link had a lot to do with the decision.

"I got involved because of what Sports Link has done over the past couple of years and the presence Sports Link has created on campus and in sports media," Taylor said. "When this opportunity was there to potentially take students across and do something with the Olympics, I think it was a natural fit."

Taylor also said the entire process of sending students to cover the Olympics has been a learning process for everyone involved.

"There's a lot of learning involved with this one; the size of the group and learning to work with a variety of people in different platforms," he said. "This is one that requires a lot of planning, a lot of travel, understanding different cultures and how you get your equipment to London, the difficulties with power and adapters and file transfer of video from London back to the United States if we're doing something timely."

Although there are some necessary difficulties Taylor said he believes the whole process has been great opportunity for students working in multimedia.

"It's a national scale that the stuff that our students produce, whether it be video, written, photo, whatever, now have millions of eyes on," he said. "That's impressive for college students."
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