New broadcast concentration available to Baylor students
By Lexi Masarweh, communication student
A new broadcast concentration, which will integrate current and new courses designed explicitly for the concentration, was recently approved by the university and will be available to Baylor students in the upcoming fall semester.
Journalism, Public Relations & New Media faculty members Emily Iazzetti, lecturer; Amber Adamson, senior lecturer of journalism and Bruce Gietzen, director of student media and a veteran of 33 years in the broadcast business; have been developing the broadcast concentration.
The new Broadcast Journalism track will become the fifth concentration for the Department of Journalism, Public Relations and New Media. Other concentrations offered include Public Relations, Advertising, Photojournalism and News Editorial. The new concentration will include the foundational courses other majors are required to take.
"We are excited to make the broadcast sequence available to students," said Dr. Mia Moody-Ramirez, chair of the Department of Journalism, Public Relations & New Media. "Professor Gietzen and his team have done a fantastic job putting the program together. Students are eager to enroll."
“The dean’s office has approved the introduction, the very first class, of what will be a broadcast sequence,” Iazzetti said. “The first one is JOU 3315, and the title of that class is Broadcast Writing.”
“Videography for Broadcast Journalism” and “Advanced Reporting/Producing for Broadcast” also will be a part of the core concentration for the Broadcast Journalism career track.
Gietzen said a faculty committee researched dozens of schools across Texas and the nation, which offer broadcast courses to determine how Baylor should structure the new concentration and attract new students.
Adamson said the broadcast track would help the department be more competitive since there has been a growing interest in broadcast careers.
Gietzen said more than 40 percent of prospective students who visited the JPRNM department in the last five years expressed an interest in broadcast journalism, and many of those participated in some type of broadcasting or newscast at their high school before making their college choice.
“Our role as faculty and staff is to provide multiple experiential opportunities for students, and hopefully one of those will become their passion, and then their career path,” Gietzen said. “We are seeing that now with a significant number of our LTVN students.”
Eighty percent of the TV stations across the country are owned by one of six companies, Gietzen said.
“A news director for one of those groups told me recently they had more than 2,000 open positions on their corporate job board, and probably 600 of those were for reporters and producers,” Gietzen said. “The reality is jobs are available in broadcast, and every station group is looking for good people to hire. We’d like those hires to be Baylor grads.”
For more information about the broadcast sequence, contact Bruce Gietzen at Bruce_Gietzen@baylor.edu