On the Air: Photo Essays: THE COLLEGE: Indiana University Bloomington

On the Air

Take a look inside a broadcast of IU Student Television.

By Raymond Fleischmann | Spring 2018
Photography by Anna Powell Denton

Broadcast journalism is a complicated thing. The news on television is at once entertainment, art, and a public service. It’s a medium that’s often far more complex than it seems. Two people behind a desk, reading the news: How difficult could it be?

Step behind the cameras and you’ll see. By way of The Media School, IU Student Television offers undergraduates the unique opportunity to take their talents on the air and put the craft of broadcast news to practice. We wanted to capture a recent broadcast of IUSTV, and in doing so capture all the work, passion, and preparation that go into a student-led broadcast news program.

“My first time ever being on camera reading a teleprompter was in fifth grade,” says Mary Kate Hamilton, a sophomore pictured above. “At my elementary school, they asked me to do the morning announcements. I did that in fifth grade, and then in seventh grade, eighth grade, tenth grade, eleventh grade, twelfth grade. I still get nervous every time I go on camera, and I think I always will. But I think the nerves make you better. They make you sharper.”

“In middle school, my dad would come home and turn on the news and I’d just sit there and watch Lester Holt with him,” says Michael Tilka, a sophomore pictured above and below. “And then in high school, I realized that I like public speaking, I enjoy watching the news with my dad, and I love sports, so I decided to combine those together.”

“You watch people on the news and they make it look so easy, but that’s because they are so good at doing it,” says Michael Dugan, a junior pictured on the monitor below. “The first couple of times that I got in front of the camera, I felt like I did a really good job. But I watched it back and my face was stone cold. I didn’t move. I wasn’t using my hands. I was like, 'This is me, and I can't watch ten seconds of it because it's so uncomfortable.' So, I’ve definitely learned to be very active. Keep your body calm, obviously, but talk with your hands, use facial expressions. You have to go over the top to make it look good on camera.”

“When my students come into class and we discuss what we make dances about, I tell them that we can make dances about anything,” Shea says. “We can make a dance about a repetitive tapping of a single finger, or we can make a dance about the displacement of millions of people around the globe. It can be very personal — it can be a memoir — or we might want to change somebody’s mind about something. And then sometimes, we might just want to perform an intellectual exercise.”

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Raymond Fleischmann

Raymond Fleischmann is director of advancement communications for the College of Arts and Sciences and serves as the primary editor for The College magazine. He holds a B.A. in English and the Individualized Major Program from Indiana University, and an M.F.A. in creative writing from Ohio State University. His first novel, How Quickly She Disappears, was published by Penguin Random House in January 2020, and his short fiction has been published in The Iowa Review, Cimarron Review, The Pinch, River Styx, and Los Angeles Review, among many others. Reach him at rfleisch@indiana.edu or through his website raymondfleischmann.com.

Anna Powell Denton

Anna Powell Denton is a photographer and filmmaker based in Bloomington, Ind. She works with both digital and film formats specializing in editorial portraiture and documentary photography.

On the Air

By Raymond Fleischmann | Spring 2018Photography by Anna Powell Denton

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