UTVS wins high Emmy honor

Recently, UTVS filmed a news program that led the station to national credit and honor.

They gathered together what Tyler Bieber, second-year student and UTVS station manager, referred to as an "All-star news team."

They put together a newscast that will go down in UTVS history.

This is the first newscast to be nominated for an Emmy.

This is also the first news cast to win that Emmy, awarded by the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences.

UTVS, which stands for University Television Station, has been broadcasting from the basement of Stewart Hall since 1977.

It is currently broadcasting continuous programming on cable channel 21 and selected live hockey games on channel 14.

The station is operated by students who tend to be mass communication majors or minors. This station is also now gaining SCSU national credit.

On March 31, at a ceremony in Los Angeles, UTVS was presented with a College Emmy for best student run newscast. University of California, Berkeley, took second place and Emerson College in Boston took third.

The award was presented in front of 400 guests representing 40 different states.

The College Emmy is geared to exposing the work of students to professionals in the television and film industry.

"Berkeley is really big into TV and so is Emerson. They're pretty well known for their program, which our program isn't really nationwide. It's becoming, but it hasn't been. That's kind of why we made a big deal of it, we are becoming well known, like these other schools," Bieber said.

UTVS didn't have to change a lot of what it was already doing to bring in this award, he said.

Bieber and Dave MacPhail, the station's general manager, said all they needed to do was make some slight adjustments to their current program.

"We did it just like we did any other newscast, Monday through Friday, half hour newscast, it was exactly the same. We submitted it to all of the different opportunities to win awards, and we won this one. This is the first year we've won it, we think it's the first year that we've even been nominated for it. So it's a pretty big deal for us," Bieber said.

Bieber co-produced the news that won the award along with third-year student Jody Norstedt.

They worked with a group of about 25 students, doing everything from anchoring to lighting to camera operating.

Each student is as important as the next in this news crew, in order to have a smooth running station. The station credits the newscast members for the award, even though other factors might have played into it.

"It was a really good newscast. We have a lot of talented people every semester, but this semester has been really good. Everyone really came together and put together a good product. We've built a new news set, so we kind of have a new look this year, that looks a little better then our previous news look. I don't know if that was considered or not, but it definitely couldn't have hurt us. I think mostly they look at our content," Bieber said.

UTVS has won numerous other awards this year as well.

They won a Kelly award which will be their six Kelly award. They also won awards from the Broadcast Education Association (BEA).

They took in a few more from the Northwest Broadcast News Association (NBMA).

But the amount of awards they have won has increased due to the fact that they have also submitted a lot more videos to different organizations.

This, in return, has increased representation of SCSU across the nation.

"In my opinion, the biggest thing is the more people that know about UTVS and what we do here, the better chance students have when they are out going to get a job. That is why students are here, they are here to get experience and to get contacts and to network. So that some day they can do this stuff and actually get paid for it. We're proud of what we do, and we want it to be recognized," Bieber said.

For more information about the awards, programming schedules or information about how to get involved with UTVS, visit www.utvs.com.