New angle for broadcast

Photo by: Abby Bellow

 

Oklahoma Christian University’s broadcast program is premiering two new “angles” for campus news.

Historically, the broadcasting and communications department has been home to one show: “Eagle Angle,” a newscast that airs weekly on Channel 3.

“‘Eagle Angle’ is the newscast that we do,” senior Dwayne Wiseman said. “We try to be like Channel 5, 4 and 9 – our main focus has been news.”

“Eagle Angle” is produced entirely by students and represents Oklahoma Christian to the entire state.

“That is pretty cool that we go out to the whole state,” senior Chelsie Flagg said. “We just really want more viewers; we want more people to know that it’s actually professional [and] it’s completely student produced.”

Partially as a result of the large number of students enrolled in broadcasting workshop this year, the broadcasting team is making additions to the standard show.

In order to compensate for the large number of students in workshop, “Eagle Angle” was initially on a track to air biweekly. Wiseman had a different idea for utilizing the extra staff.

“Instead of extending ‘Eagle Angle’ more than just one day a week, I decided to create the two new shows,” Wiseman said. “The entertainment show is called ‘E Squared.’ It’s a mash between ‘The View’ and ‘Entertainment Tonight.’ We cover music [and] movies and we talk about hot topics: things that are going around campus.”

The second addition revolves around sports.

“The sports one is just like an ‘ESPN First Take,’” Flagg said. “We sit around and talk about sports; it’s really fun.”

Wiseman expressed excitement about the addition.

“[The sports broadcast] is called ‘The Four Quarters,’” Wiseman said. “It’s four quarters of four different topics and there are four anchors. We really played up ‘The Four Quarters’ idea. We have a halftime and everything. It’s pretty exciting.”

“The Four Quarters” covers more than just Oklahoma Christian sports.

“March Madness is going to be a big thing for ‘The Four Quarters’ coming up,” Wiseman said. “We’re really trying to gear something up – we want to see the students have their own bracket, and hopefully we can get a contest going.”

Both shows are reaching out beyond the culture of Oklahoma Christian to find topics and present the opinions of the student body.

“We really want people to get involved with ‘Eagle Angle,’” Flagg said. “We’ve tried to start some giveaways, but we’ve never had enough viewers to do it.”

In order to get viewers more involved in the show, Eagle broadcasting now has a Twitter presence under the handle @OCEagleAngle.

“On our show we always plug … our Twitter, we want you to tweet your opinions,” Flagg said. “We really like that, because then we could grow from that.”

The broadcasting team encourages the student body to get involved in Eagle broadcasting, whether by tweeting with the anchors or keeping up with the Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday broadcasts.

“We’ve really been trying – especially this semester – to get people to just watch ‘Eagle Angle,’” Flagg said. “A lot of people didn’t know we had it, so a lot of promotion has been put in this year.”

The transition to the new shows involved a good amount of student effort.

“It’s definitely been an experience from my end, just starting everything up and overseeing it,” Wiseman said.

The addition of two more shows, along with the size of the workshop class, has created a more complicated workload for the student journalists.

“There are a lot of moving parts, a lot of things to get adjusted to,” junior Geoffrey Fogle said. “Our workshop class has 43 or 44 people and normally we have about 20 or 25. We’re teaching all these people new things … and getting people involved. It’s just testing of patience sometimes, just because we have to remember that we were there at one point as well. They’re not going to understand everything the first time you tell them.”

Flagg asserted the benefits outweigh the cost.

“It’s more work, but it’s worth it,” Flagg said. “It’s really exciting because no other school gets to do this, especially in the communications department. At other schools, ESPN comes in and does their basketball games, so we get the hands-on experience that no other school really gets.”

As they look ahead, the team hopes to get a larger audience, especially for the new shows.

“Eventually, I would love for it to be something that we would be able to broadcast on Cox,” Wiseman said. “Right now, Cox Cable does cover our ‘Eagle Angle’ every Wednesday. Obviously that comes with contracts and all kinds of different stuff. The ultimate goal, if it gets off the ground, is that maybe we can present Cox with something new, fresh and different, and say, ‘Hey, we’ve got something we want to add.’”

To tune in to Eagle broadcasting, visit http://www.oc.edu/eaglebroadcasting and click the live stream link. “The Four Quarters” streams live on Tuesdays at 4 p.m. and “E Squared” streams Mondays at 4 p.m. The Eagle Angle newscast starts at 5:30 p.m. every Wednesday on Channel 3.