Internship Experience #5: 90.5 FM WCBE Columbus

The latest stint of internship hours at WCBE were really varied with a lot of different projects popping up here and there. One of our main focuses was on a big presentation that our bosses would end up giving to the Columbus School District Board of Educators to speak on WCBE’s value and importance as a Columbus City Schools (CCS) entity. This project took over a week between the entire team and multiple hours of graphic design, professional writing, and gathering data were put in. There were other small projects that I’m going to touch on in their own individual blogs (mainly because of the amount of detail with each one), but most of our time outside working on the presentation was dedicated to large student intern projects and initiatives, both for the Capital intern group and for the Fort Hayes/CAHS students.

A couple weeks after the Spring Fund Drive, there was a WCBE weekly team meeting in which a video clip was shown of CCS board members discussing the large cost of the radio station and how it compared to its worth. This was particularly frightening regarding finances, as lack of federal public radio broadcast funding has put stations across the country in need of financial support. Our bosses, Johnny DiLoretto (WCBE Head of Community Relations) and Paul Brown (CCS Multimedia Executive Producer), tasked myself and the rest of the Capital interns to create a presentation for another upcoming board meeting, in which Johnny and Paul would present the information on behalf of the station. Their idea was to show the board how involved the station is with the betterment of student technical education, especially in musical fields. They also wanted to provide visual and audible proof of some of the work students have done and some of the effects the station has had on the greater Columbus community. Additionally, they thought they could further drive the point of student success across if by boasting that student interns made the same presentation being presented to the board. We all agreed with the idea and were on board, quickly getting started on creating the presentation and laying the groundwork for the slides and additional details.

Here is the editing screen for the Powerpoint presentation created by the Capital intern team. With multiple slides ranging from student experience to public comments and community engagement, we made sure to touch on every part of WCBE’s value and impact.

My specific job with the presentation project required a lot of small graphic creations and writing. The first was the title screen, which ended up being the easiest. All it took was a red/black gradient background and an enlarged version of the WCBE logo. Additionally, I helped fellow intern Joe G. in creating the building logo. We searched for a large chunk of time for an acceptable building icon that closely resembled the Leveque Tower in downtown Columbus. Johnny wanted us to include this sort of similarity to represent the same tower that the WCBE station signal is broadcast from, acting as a source of symbolism to further work off of in the presentation. We shaded the different sections according to what we felt was the “foundation”, “mid-levels” and “peak” of the tower, corresponding with the listed and prioritized benefits. Finally, I created a new coverage map for the station, reflecting how far the WCBE signal extends throughout Columbus. It was a little difficult to find a full county map of our and a detailed crosshair icon that matched well, but after a bit of searching and digital editing in Canva, I had the new coverage map created. Since the current coverage map on the WCBE website is currently very outdated, I’m hoping the station will use my graphic as its replacement. I also helped import the student project samples into the slideshow so that they could be played to the board as examples of all the different levels of student work, from the planning and execution, to the behind-the-scenes editing, and more.

Overall, my major contribution was in the writing. I helped to write a lot of the different titles, captions, and effectively all of the speaker notes in each slide. While the titles and captions were easy to brainstorm with the group, the speaker notes were quite difficult as they required much more detail about the contents of each slide and I worked on them solo. I ended up doing a solid job at describing each slide in a manner that gave the speakers (Johnny and Paul) effective notes to look off of, as neither of them ended up making any changes to the speaker notes and said they provided exceptional detail.

Shown below are some of the slides from the Powerpoint presentation that I worked the most on within the intern group.