Dean Paul Voakes

As a faculty and staff, we're generally a fairly nose-to-the-grindstone bunch: teach courses, advise students, read research, conduct research, do e-mail, attend meetings – in a modest, 91-year-old building. It's just not in our nature to show off.

But this fall it's different. We're showing off a little. We can't help it.

As you'll read elsewhere in Bylines, our students have the good fortune of new facilities in not just one area but two: our broadcast studio and our Campus Press newsroom.

I can't help but notice the "wow" factor when I'm with students, prospective students and their parents, or alumni in the new ATLAS (Alliance for Technology, Learning and Society) building. The place has that "new building" fragrance, which in this case means a sort of "state of the art" essence as well. Parents and alums with broadcast experience recognize immediately the quality of the equipment; they're the ones with the loudest "wows."

But let me take you inside the ATLAS story. The fabulous new cameras, digital consoles and recording equipment were provided with the assumption that the School would transplant its existing, decades-old studio lights, news desk, backdrop and other set pieces from the former studio in the bowels of Folsom Field. But the notion of putting that unreliable equipment and those creaky, dated, undersized set pieces into such an elegant new space seemed, well, unbecoming. So broadcast instructor Paul Daugherty and Assistant Dean Steve Jones began calling on the School's many friends in the television business, and the response has been remarkable.

KMGH-Channel 7 in Denver was about to replace the backdrops on its anchor set, and instead of selling them to another station, it gave them to us. For the first few weeks of the semester, the "NewsTeam" and "CU Sports Mag" students anchored their shows in front of a sparkling, nocturnal downtown Denver skyline.

Then came a bit of serendipity. Howard and Tana Schultz, who run a successful television production studio in Los Angeles, were moving their first-year-student son into his dorm (Howard is a CU alum). I met them, we toured the ATLAS building and the Schultzes' "wows" were enthusiastic, to say the least. They noticed that the Denver skyline may not be the most appropriate backdrop for CU news, and in short order they made a gift to the School to provide a new photographic sheath for the backdrop: a brilliant panorama of the campus and the Flatirons.

Meanwhile, Denver stations were helping in other ways. Fox Sports Net Rocky Mountain donated its handsome anchor desk, with a blank spot just right for a CU logo on the front. UPN's Channel 20, in the process of becoming My20 Denver, donated a small news desk, which the students will be using as an "update desk" for live reports elsewhere in the studio. Direct TV of Denver donated nearly new studio lights and several other set pieces.

As we settle in, we see opportunities to make the broadcast experience even more professional. For example, the students' computer labs and digital editing bays are still in the Armory – without a networked connection to the studio. Connecting the students' scripts to the studio's TelePrompters and control-room server would dramatically reduce the time and work required to prepare the broadcast.

Equipping reporters and videographers with wireless microphones and "sun gun" lights for field work would dramatically increase their reporting capabilities. And of course, "state of the art" demands that we consistently replace the obsolete. A fund to regularly upgrade and update our studio and portable equipment would guard against obsolescence.

Furnishing and equipping the ATLAS studio is a good example of private gifts supplementing the University's outlay, but the story of the Campus Press is a good example of what can be done with virtually no university outlay.

My column last spring was a hopeful, expectant litany of possibilities for the online student "newspaper," and now, as with the broadcast studio, wishes have become reality. The Campus Press has a new look, at thecampuspress.com, and a new newsroom with new equipment and furnishings with which to ply the emerging craft of interactive, daily digital journalism.

Last spring I reported that we had raised $35,000 in response to a challenge gift from Leona "Nonie" Lann ('48) (that is, Nonie is matching each dollar we raise with a dollar of her own). That total is now up to $70,000, which has provided $140,000 thanks to Nonie's match.

We owe huge thanks also to the friends and family of the late Professor Mal Deans, whose memorial gifts have provided the lion's share of the match.

Of the total gift income, we've spent about $68,000 on the construction and furnishing of the new newsroom, and we've been able to set aside $35,000 in an endowment to provide new software or equipment each year — in perpetuity.

So this is the year we've officially staked a claim among the leading-edge student media across the country. We've always known our students had talent. I can't wait to see what they can do with their new technology. We may have to do a bit more showing off.