University celebrates the U.S. Constitution with week of events

Our Constitution Day festivities are underway. Students are encouraged to enjoy a sandwich on our Bobcat Way Lawn through 2 p.m. at our banned book reading. We’re hosting a week of Constitution-focused events. (Photo by Jamie DeLoma, assistant director of public relations and social media.)

The university is recognizing Constitution Day with a week-long celebration for our students.

Among the highlights:

Monday, Sept. 17 from noon to 2 p.m.: Banned-book reading and free lunch on the Bobcat Way Lawn

Tuesday, Sept. 18 from 9:30 to 11 a.m.: The School of Law will screen “Law and Disorder: Criminal Justice on TV and in Real Life” in room 317 of the School of Law Center. The webcast will consider if everyone gets equal treatment under the law.

Tuesday, Sept. 18 at 6:30 p.m.: Campus conversation with Hamden Mayor Scott Jackson in the Carl Hansen Student Center room 225. The mayor will discuss civic responsibility.

Wednesday, Sept. 19: Our Student Government Association will host freshman elections. Members of the Class of 2016 will be able to vote from 12:01 a.m. through 8 p.m.

Thursday, Sept. 20 at 7 p.m.: Charlie Gibson, former ABC World News anchor, will deliver the lecture “The (Im)balance of Power in Washington: How Things Went Off the Rails and How They Can Be Fixed.”

Throughout the week, our Arnold Bernhard Library has done the following:

• Feature reference books on the U.S. Constitution
• Create a U.S. Constitution Day research guide
• Distribute U.S. Constitution bookmarks at the circulation and reference desks

Beyond this week, the university will:

• Showcase a banned books exhibit beginning on Sept. 23 on the first floor of the Arnold Bernhard Library

Expanded Carl Hansen Student Center expected to open near start of next academic year

The expansion of the Carl Hansen Student Center into the space formerly known as Alumni Hall on our Mount Carmel Campus continues. We expect the space to be in use in the fall semester. It includes a two-sided fireplace, a large open gathering area, conference rooms and Greek Life and media suites, complete with a TV studio.

The University is on track to complete the expansion of the Carl Hansen Student Center near the start of the 2012-13 academic year.

“We’re making good progress,” said Joseph Rubertone, associate vice president for facilities, as he recently toured the space formerly known as Alumni Hall.

Please click here to see a photo tour of the construction area.

Twenty-five construction workers are in the process of pouring concrete and laying bricks. Also included in the crew are electricians, masons, iron workers and plumbers. However, the speed of their progress depends on weather conditions. Although it has been a relatively mild winter, crews are battling frost on the Echlin side of the work site.

The renovation, which began last January, will include new suites for the university’s media and Greek Life organizations, bigger meeting rooms and a large open area for the community to gather in front of a two-sided gas fireplace. In all, the space will add 10,000 square feet of space to the student center.

However, before that could be constructed, the building had to be gutted. New walls, windows, roofing and steel were installed throughout the former Alumni Hall structure.

Students will be able to enter the renovated space from the existing student center.

The first floor will include a large open gathering area that will comfortably seat about 100 people; a Greek Life suite; a suite for the University’s media organizations, complete with a TV studio; four conference rooms and the gas-fueled fireplace.

“It provides a living room for the campus, a place to hang around to see and to be seen,” said Rubertone.

The second floor, accessible from the second floor of the existing student center as well as via two circular staircases leading from the downstairs of the renovated space, will feature a large multi-purpose meeting room with a 12-foot projection screen; two smaller meeting rooms; a general area for about 70 student organizations with wooden, lockable spaces; lounges and game tables.

The first phase of the project was completed over the summer when the second floor of the existing student center was renovated and Campus Ministry and the Office of Community Service relocated to the space shared with student center staff. The floor’s bathrooms and elevator were also renovated, and the Student Programming Board moved into the area formerly used by the Chronicle, Montage and Summit media organizations.

“This is an exciting time,” said Daniel Brown, assistant dean and director of the student center. “This is something that will benefit not just our students, but the entire university.”

Put the ‘me’ in student media

Our student media leaders shared their reasons for being part of their respective groups ahead of Wednesday’s media summit in the Mount Carmel Dining Hall at 9:15 p.m.

You may read about the 10 media-related organizations scheduled to participate in the summit here.

 

Chronicle staffer ready to catapult paper to new heights

By Michele Snow ’13
Managing Editor, Quinnipiac Chronicle

This spring, I was promoted to managing editor of the Quinnipiac Chronicle, the university’s student-run newspaper.

Even though I applied for the position and really wanted it, the title originally felt like an oversized T-shirt. I was suddenly apprehensive to assume more responsibility on the paper, considering that I am a history major with only a media writing course under my belt and not a trained journalism authority. My experience consists of the few hundred hours I’ve spent in the Chronicle office.

So when I got an email from my oh-so-generous and thoughtful editor-in-chief, Lenny Neslin, with an invitation to a seminar for college editors at the University of Georgia, I jumped at the chance to grow into my new position.

On July 24, after playing in-flight trivia with 50 high-school students who were on a youth group trip, and enduring a shuttle ride past Chick-Fil-A ads, a billboard with nothing but the word “JESUS” on it, and a sign for “Hot, Boiled Peanuts,” (exit 53 if you’re interested,) I finally arrived in Athens, Ga.

My fellow attendees of the Management Seminar for College News Editors had already been tweeting with the #mscne11 tag, deft, social-media-centric journalists that they are, which conveniently allowed me to find them. I was also pleased to discover that meeting my roommate was like staring into a personality mirror.

The other attendees were mostly editors-in-chief, which made the few of us who were managing editors feel that much luckier to be there. Although working on college newspapers was the one thing we all had in common, and though we came from different corners of the United States and universities of different sizes, we were all passionate about making our papers and ourselves better.

All week I was so impressed by the quality of the presenters.

On Monday morning, Butch Ward of the Poynter Institute, spoke to the 60 of us about being leaders in our news organizations.

Adults I’ve known in the past love to talk about leadership, taking initiative, being a good listener, claiming responsibility and encouraging communication. Then they have the students engage in fluffy team-building exercises in matching T-shirts before sending everyone home.

Ward didn’t do that. He gave us real, attainable goals that we could work into our own schedules and tailor to our own processes.

We learned the most from him, but perhaps more importantly, we learned from each other. We shared difficult situations we had all faced on our papers and later, in the legal seminar, we shared stories about censorship and valiant attempts at gaining access to public records.

This became a theme throughout the week: learning from our presenters and learning from each other. The longer we sat in that seminar room, the more comfortable we felt addressing each other directly or offering up solutions that had worked for our own papers.

Our presenters were all prominent, experienced editors and professors, from the Associated Press, the Dallas Morning News and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, among others.

Similar themes emerged from their presentations:

• Build relationships, they said.
• Identify who you’ll need in the future and start establishing contacts now.
• Build these relationships with officials both at the university and in the community, but also with your staff.
• Cultivate and coach your team in such a way that they can turn around and shape an even better team when you’re long gone.
• Use as much technology as possible and use it as often as possible.
• If you’ve heard the news industry is dying, it’s not; it’s just morphing into a multi-platform conversation. The best editors learn how to take advantage of this and they do it with video, social media, photos, social media, user-friendly websites and social media. Did I mention social media?

We had the opportunity to tour CNN’s headquarters, and an overhead view of the central newsroom revealed at least two monitors in every row of computers running TweetDeck. The importance of a social media presence was not lost on any of us. It’s Newspaper Survival 101 at this point.

Have a plan in place to handle breaking news, the industry veterans urged. Wednesday’s itinerary centered around a staged bus crash, complete with actors, vehicles and caution tape. The mock crisis combined the importance of covering breaking news effectively and the critical nature of covering all your multimedia bases.

Divided into teams of seven or eight students, we covered the event with an impressive seriousness and had two hours to get the “breaking news” up on our “website” with lots of multimedia content.

It was incredible to watch everybody ditch their nonchalant curiosity in the classroom and shift into full-blown journalist mode.

And if nothing else proved to us the importance of having a plan for breaking news, it was the presentation from the managing editor of The Crimson White, the University of Alabama’s student newspaper.

On April 27, a devastating tornado hit the area that devastated their community. The success of their coverage came from their effective use of Twitter, one of their only lines of communication after all cell service shut down, their ability to create a system for confirming student deaths before the university released the information and their brilliant idea of posting a Google map of the area which linked their coverage to spots on the map. This way, they saw what neighborhoods they hadn’t covered, and they went out and covered them.

This week was one of the most exhausting, challenging, enlightening and rewarding experiences of my life. I am so grateful for the opportunity, for the contacts I developed, the friendships I made and the knowledge and ideas I gained.

I realized the Quinnipiac Chronicle is already a fairly excellent paper as far as student newspapers go, but now I’ve got several ways to make it better. Plus, we do it all with a relatively small group of dedicated individuals working out of a student media trailer. We don’t have a marble building with two floors of cubicles, we don’t have a circulation or distribution team and we don’t pay everybody on staff. But our product is just as good as some of the best papers in the country that have all of those resources at their disposal.

We’ve been fortunate to have some really talented leaders at the Chronicle in the past as well as this year, but it’s time for our underclassmen (myself included,) to start rising to meet the standards that have been set. Butch Ward, of the Poynter Institute, told us on the first morning that journalists are a combination of patient and busy. It’s a healthy balance of the two that turns out some phenomenal work.

Alumni to broadcast at Fenway Park

By Lila Carney
Assistant Director of Student Media

Alex Birsh '11, right, produces a game broadcast for QBSN with co-director, Corey Hersch last year.

Quinnipiac Bobcats Sports Network alumnus and former co-director Alex Birsh, ’11 has been chosen to broadcast a game today at historic Fenway Park.

The match-up is the New England Collegiate Baseball League All-Stars vs. Team USA Collegiate National Team exhibition contest at noon.

Birsh will work alongside Sal Accardi ’09, another Quinnipiac alum. Both broadcasters were chosen to represent the New England Collegiate Baseball League.

This summer, Birsh began his second season as the broadcaster for the Keene Swamp Bats and third in the NECBL.

According to a Swamp Bats press release, Birsh said:

“It still hasn’t sunk in that the NECBL has chosen me to represent them in the broadcast booth. It makes me proud to call myself a Keene Swamp Bat, as well as a Quinnipiac University alum. … I can’t wait to represent both in one of the finest fields in the world.”

You can listen to Accardi and Birsh’s call of the game at www.teamline.cc or at www.necbl.com.

New Quinnipiac alumni already are doing great things out in the work world!