ACE Spectrum
ACE Spectrum
Ace Spectrum is about you — the ACE Learning Centers.
It’s a quick sharing of ideas, inspiration, opinions and best practices among our continuing education organizations.
Please join the conversation.
KALW and Audio Academy Journalists Win San Francisco Press Club Honors
By Ben Trefny, News Director, KALW, Listener Supported Public Radio
It’s awards season for Bay Area journalists, and this is a big one for KALW. On Thursday, many members of our team will be honored by the San Francisco Press Club for stories and programs produced during the 2018 calendar year. And many of those are graduates of our Audio Academy training program!
See below for the honorees (with Audio Academy fellows noted with their graduating years in parentheses):
Overall Excellence — Team — “Crosscurrents”
Public Affairs Program — Rose Aguilar, Malihe Razazan, Kevin Vance, Laura Wenus — “Your Call”
Documentary — Ninna Gaensler-Debs and Holly J. McDede — “Meet the lawyers fighting the federal government to save their clients from deportation””
Feature Story / Light Nature — Emma McAvoy and Holly J. McDede — “At Alcatraz Alumni Reunion, former convicts are rockstars”
Feature Story / Light Nature — Christine Nguyen (’18) — “Finding home in San Jose’s Grand Century Mall”
Feature Story / Serious Nature — Marisol Medina-Cadena (’19) — “Oakland-raised Maya are bridging the Mam language gap in local courts”
Investigative Reporting — Claire Stremple (’17) — “San Francisco may be the first city in the nation to open safe injection sites”
News Story — Marco Siler-Gonzales — “United Methodist Church alleges moral corruption in Glide’s leadership”
Series — Damon L. Cooke, Steve Drown, Spoon Jackson, Hannah Kingsley-Ma, Joe Kirk, Bryan Mazza, JulianGlenn “Luke” Padgett, Jessica Placzek, Andrew Stelzer, b.f. thames, Eli Wirtschafter — “Uncuffed”
Sports Feature — Kristi Coale — “19th Century Baseball Lives On In Bay Area Parks”
Sports Feature — Bo Walsh (’18) — “The Stanford Band scatters on”
Take a few minutes to click on some of those stories and see what makes them among the best produced in the Bay Area.
Meanwhile, of course, we’re still busy producing, and training the next cohort of award-winners! Here are some thoughts from Audio Academy fellow Precious Green:
Precious Green winning her first award — our in-house trophy — for recording her first story: “an election brief about San Francisco’s Proposition F“
Photo credit: Ben Trefny
I applied to the Audio Academy out of curiosity. My public radio listener bonafides were solid. I just wanted to know a little more about how the stories are made and how I could tell some of my own. I honestly didn’t think much about a reporting beat or what this might mean as a career. My goals were simple: create a good story and maybe get Audie Cornish or Scott Simon to notice me. And so I gave it a shot, and KALW said, “Yes!”
At some point during our orientation, our coordinator, Marissa Ortega-Welch, let us know that we were journalists. We even got KALW News business cards. You know that nervous chuckle you make when someone tells you something about yourself that you aren’t really ready to believe? Well, that was me at that moment. Thankfully, it soon clicked. My fellow Academy classmates and I are journalists. We are a diverse array of life experiences, training and voices that represent all corners of the Bay Area. We are uncovering and crafting powerful stories for and about our community.
There is so much that happens before a listener hears a news story that she shares with her co-workers. Iconic “driveway moments” don’t just happen. They take work. For me, it’s also taken a lot of learning of newsroom fundamentals. Each week, another fellow and I work side by side with KALW’s dynamic reporters, editors and engineers to craft news broadcasts and programming.
I am grateful to have a cohort to experience it with. During our time together, we’ve bonded during our weekly seminars. We’ve gone into the field with headphones on and mics at the ready to capture the sounds and stories of our neighbors. We have anxiously uploaded clips and tracks to Pro Tools and learned the fundamentals of storycraft. Each of us has worked on breaking news, researched and prepared election briefs, and now we are diving into truly immersive storytelling. It has been amazing.
Alpha Parent Learning Center Preps Parent to Earn High School Diploma
Daysi Nava (center) is congratulated by Alejandro Espinoza, Parent Learning Center Lead (left) and Karen Martinez, Parent Learning Center Manager.
The Alpha Parent Learning Center supports parents of students in the Alpha School District not just with English as a second language, but also to provide the opportunity and support for parents to earn their high school diploma. This diploma opens up opportunities for further education and employment and can be golden.
Daysi Nava is the current student that is now working on earning her high school diploma. She will earn it by the end of this school year. The entire team from Alpha Parent Learning Center is very excited for her and she requested a special song to be sung an inspiration and motivation.
Our Parent Learning Center send off to high school – Congrats Daysi Nava who had this song request from our English AMAZING English teacher Adrian Parra
Posted by Alpha Parent Learning Center on Wednesday, October 31, 2018
Congratulations Nava. Onward to your high school diploma.
Learning to Define the “Face of Radio” at KALW Audio Academy
By Ben Trefny, News Director, KALW, Listener Supported Public Radio
KALW’s Audio Academy plus special guests take a class on feature production. Pictured (clockwise from center): Julia Llinas Goodman, Precious Green, Christopher Egusa, Sona Avakian, Joshua Sirotiak, Victor Tence, Marissa Ortega-Welch, Sarah Lai Stirland, Adreanna Rodriguez, Katie McCutcheon, and Imran Ali Malik
Photo credit: Ben Trefny
Last week, we brought our Audio Academy fellows over to our new Oakland offices at StudioToBe for a seminar on feature story production. It’s been great to have desk and conference space at a place that hosts producers from the podcast Snap Judgment(including Audio Academy graduates Liz Mak [’14] and Chris Hambrick [’15]), the nationally syndicated radio show Making Contact, and lots of independent podcast makers. We’re looking forward to building upon relationships we’ve got and forging new ones.
One of the students taking part in our lesson, taught by KALW‘s teaching coordinator Marissa Ortega-Welch, was Victor Tence. We’ll continue our in-person introductions to our new fellows with a few words he wrote about his experience in the Audio Academy so far:
Do I have a face for radio?
I asked this question as a quip, but it was more or less my charming way to let my friends know about my upcoming time with KALW’s Audio Academy. However, despite the wide range of responses, from supportive, to enthusiastically insulting, I realized I myself couldn’t picture who belonged on the air.
What does public radio’s face look like?
Up until my first week in KALW’s office, it would have been difficult for me to say, though I certainly had my suspicions. Before, had I been made to guess, I would have predicted a work space that greeted you with two racks, one for coats and the other for your NPR tote bag. I could envision mornings of radio people asking about each other’s breakfast, for personal and professional reasons.
I will not say that my prediction was completely wrong, it was however woefully incomplete. Which is to be expected, considering how ethereal audio can be as a medium. Public radio itself, and the people behind the considerable work that goes into the production, can be just as invisible as the radio waves that carry their voices.
I still cannot recognize the titans of the craft like Terry Gross or Ira Glass on the street. Furthermore, radio is elusive and hard to pin down in a whole host of other ways. Where do I find this intersection where news is informative, concise and complete, as well as conversational, full of personality and ultimately human?
As it turns out, KALW’s Audio Academy, nestled discreetly behind a high school and between a quiet park that silently boasts sweeping views of Hunter’s point is a wonderful place to begin looking.