Expand the Mills Public Radio Program

Proposal 

The Mills' public radio program is unique in American undergraduate education; students love it and cannot get it anywhere else. It is an excellent vehicle for connecting with Oakland and for garnering national visibility for Mills. In its first 6 years the program has been recognized with state and national awards. This is a proposal to build on its success.

Status Quo 

An introductory class is offered in the fall semester. This class has been compared to a boot camp: students learn by doing, doing things they have never done in academic career (attending a city council meeting, cold calling to interview someone, doing primary research, etc.). They learn the principals of public interest reporting, an organic method of community reporting, how to write lean and clear prose, and how to produce a radio story.

An intermediate course is offered in the spring semester. This class does graduate level work. Each class has a focus; past examples have been schools, redevelopment, returning veterans, and the recession. The class as editorial team fans out in part of Oakland and to document what is happening in an on-going blog, as they research radio stories that create a portrait of a place and help people understand a larger issue.

The program has collaborated with CUSP at the school of education, anthropology and sociology.

Because so many students want to continue with this work, the program creates opportunities to work on individual documentary projects, internships at KALW and other skill building opportunities. About 100 students have taken the classes over the past six years. One, Sarah Gonzales, won the extremely competitive Kroc Fellowship at NPR in 2010. She and others have gone on to work in public radio.

What We Could Be Doing 

An expanded program might include:

1. A Series of six broadcast lectures—high profile women in leadership, recorded for broadcast and distributed nationally through the Public Radio Exchange. Such a program might partner with organizations like the Commonwealth Club.
2. Create new class creative non-fiction for live story-telling in which students would come to the class with a story that could be turned into a live, multi-media presentation. The actual performance could become a Mills version of a “underground” event like pop up magazine.
3. Create advanced documentary course
4. Provide summer intensive reporting seminar
5. Create documentary unit that is producing work for national outlets such as NPR, Snap Judgment , This American Life, Radio Ambulante , etc. 

Resources Needed

To begin to move in the directions described above would require a single producer/reporter to expand the curriculum, produce the broadcast series and live events and handle the technical production. Including expenses for the current program the budget for the entire program would be about $100k annually.

Benefits and Possibilities

This program could involve 30-40 students per year and would provide opportunity for students to follow a cumulative curriculum over 2 or 3 years. A summer program might expand this further. The current program serves about 12 students per year. The program would strengthen the existing journalism minor and it resonates with programs in inter-media art and the social sciences. It could be a cornerstone component of a revived communications major.

The products of the program have a unique opportunity to expose the Mills name to a national audience. The various networks mentioned above are all already in place and are hungry for the kind of material Mills students could produce. The program would be a double-edged contribution to community outreach: students would be involved in community-based public interest journalism and the results of their work would be publicly visible and accessible.

This represents an opportunity to create a destination program as it is unlike anything offered to American undergraduates.

See Also 

• Sandhya Dirks(Mills alumna) “How Mills Public Radio Changed My Life” 
• "Mills College Students Win Documentary Awards From American Women in Radio and Television" 
• "Northern California Society of Professional Journalists Honors Students"  

Some Recent Stories by Mills Alums 

• "Vote While You Shop: 'Pop-Up' Poll Sites Sweep Iowa" by Sandhya Dirks October 24, 2012 
• "13th Grade: Why More Florida Students Than Ever Struggle With Math" by Sarah Gonzales December 10, 2012