Starting from Scratch: How to Build a Progressive Broadcast Branch within an Operational Student Organization

The University of Oklahoma has had OU Nightly, a student-run newscast, available to meteorology students to practice broadcasting for many years now. In the beginning, the newscast struggled to get people to join and devote time each semester to the show. After a good kickstart, the OU Nightly weather program is booming. Because of its popularity there aren’t as many spots available to new students, unfortunately. Thus, we saw an opportunity to give students more room to explore as undergraduate and graduate students, by building ‘OWL Broadcast’.

The Oklahoma Weather Lab has traditionally been a student-led forecasting organization, headquartered on the first floor of the National Weather Center behind glass walls. The organization focuses on operational meteorology, and also contains OU Nightly Weather within its umbrella. Due to the organization’s pride in helping provide students find their calling within the field, we saw an opportunity to add a broadcast branch other than OU Nightly. One that did not include as much commitment, and would serve as a way students could try out the television side of meteorology, work on communication skills, and apply what we learn in classes to real world events.

The broadcast room was a long project, where the finish line has just come into sight. Two years ago, we started to work on getting the room to be functional. The bare minimums, including a Baron Omni system were implemented. A green sheet tapped to the wall as a green screen and a borrowed camera were the main ingredients used. Over time, a side monitor was attached to the wall, the wall was painted green, studio lights were included, and a 4k camera with a wireless microphone were the finishing touches. This room now serves as a multi-faceted workplace for not only student organizations, but government organizations like NSSL as well.

OWL Broadcast, the new broadcast branch of the Oklahoma Weather Lab, is one of the groups that uses the broadcast room. The videos they record are a way for people to try out broadcast meteorology, without devoting time each week to OU Nightly, or to let students practice their skills outside of a formal newscast. The videos can be as scientific as the broadcaster wants them to be, or not. The main goals of the videos are to take the stress out of on-camera presence, to focus on the science of communication, and to enjoy the experience. OWL Broadcast videos cover any weather topic nationwide, and are posted to OWL social media, being at most one minute long. We have covered in the past everything from Hurricane Florence, to a cold snap in the Great Plains. They are open to everyone as well, which brings us back to the main points of inclusion, learning, and fun!

Our goals for the 2019-2020 school year is to record as many videos as possible. We are also planning to add a backlight kit, and a front monitor to the setup. By presenting at AMS we hope to show other programs how they could benefit from starting something similar, and display our videos.

Here is a link to our most recent video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsvmYzyXtzM