#MCCMediaNOW – Communication, Media, Game Design Student Showcase

Hello, this is Phillip Misenti and boy, do I have quite the story for you today. It’s about how a summertime toy became a Christmas tradition.

Every year at Christmas night, I visit my family at my Uncle Chris’ house in the hills of Springfield, Massachusetts. Everyone comes from all over and the place is packed! I usually hang with on my little cousins, make sure they don’t get into trouble. They are quite the handful, I’ll tell you that.

Once all the presents are opened, they like to go down to the basement and play with whatever is down there. There is so much of it, they might trip and hurt themselves, despite the seemingly clear round path. While looking after them, I like to play along with them so I don’t look like an overprotective party pooper. It may be dangerous, but keep in mind we are only down there once a year.

One time, I want to say 2014, we were playing hide-and-seek with the lights out, and little Carter tripped on something and almost hurt himself. We then turned the lights on and saw what tripped him was a long, yellow pool noodle. I christened it “Noodle Man”, a righter of wrongs, especially if that wrong almost got somebody hurt.

Over the years, we took turns being Noodle Man’s assistant, but in 2018 there was a bit of a spat. Chloe and Brodie were tugging the noodle, fighting over who’s turn it was going to be. I tried to stop them for a peaceful resolve…but it was too late. Noodle Man split in two.

Now you think that would be the end of the story, right? Wrong! Noodle Man lives! Now that he has multiplied, he has a noodle wife by his side, and they do lots of noodle-y things together, if you catch my drift. And that’s my story of how a tube of swimming pool foam became a festive holiday icon…at least for my little cousins.

So I was reading through an old Journal of mine and found an entry from 2009 when I was 15 years old. At that time I was living in this big old Victorian house that was owned by a family friend. They lived in the main part of the house and my mom and I lived in the back apartment side.

On the night of July 16th there was a really powerful thunderstorm coming through. My mom had left to go to my grandparents’ house right before the storm came in and I had stayed at home. I remember I was watching TV and getting frustrated that the picture was all fuzzy from the storm interfering with the signal.

I had a dog named Roxy, who really hated thunder storms, but this night she was particularly agitated and refused to leave my side. I didn’t pay much attention to her odd behavior until suddenly.

I heard this massive cracking noise unlike anything I had ever heard before, and the entire house walls, windows furniture, everything shook violently. It felt like the house had just split in two. The dog, who had been laying next to me was now cowering in fear in my lap. While just sat there stunned too afraid to move.

It took me a minute before my mind and body could function again, and at that point I picked up the dog and I ran over to the other half of the house to see if they knew what had happened. My friend’s parents assumed something nearby had gotten hit by lightning, but we weren’t sure what it was and we were too nervous to risk going out to check. We thought maybe the magnolia tree next to the house had gotten hit, but it seemed fine, so we just assumed that it was the flagpole in the front yard.

Once the storm died down, my mom came home and said to us, “Hey, did you know there’s chunks of brick in the driveway? Did something happen?” We followed her outside and looked up to the roof to see. Sure enough, lightning had struck the chimney, and had blown half of it off! At this point we all wanted to calm down and go to bed, but the Fire Department showed up and made us stand outside while they inspected the house.

Luckily nothing, aside from the chimney, was badly damaged or on fire so the whole ordeal only took a couple of hours to resolve. I honestly don’t know how to explain what the lightning strike sounded like. It was a completely surreal experience and one that I will never forget.

Albert Kim: Joining us via Zoom right now is a dear friend and colleague Kevin Nathan. He is an anchor, a Reporter, journalist, broadcast journalist at NBC Connecticut in West Hartford. Welcome, Kevin!

Kevin Nathan: Al, always great to see you, your smile and your passion for broadcasting. Forgive me everybody. I’m outside here with Covid restrictions. I wanted to get out of The Newsroom. Most areas are off limits in The Newsroom and I-84 is about 100 yards away. So hopefully it can hear me; hope I don’t get blown away. We’re getting some big winds later today.

Albert Kim: So you guys are located – the NBC studios there – the Hartford affiliate is located right behind West Farms Mall there, and so that’s where you’ve been for how long now?

Kevin Nathan: 24 plus years. Now it’s been a great run and I got here in 1996 as a sportscaster or weekend sports anchor with the legendary Beasley Reese, sports director, former New York giant and my goal at the time was to stay for a couple of years and try to go to ESPN. And my wife, Christine, now we’re starting a family and Beasley left and it kind of looked at each other and thought you know what? This isn’t such a bad situation. It may not have the cachet of ESPN, but it will afford me a better work life balance. I like to be involved with community stories. I didn’t know I would be here, you know a quarter of a century, but but here we are. It’s been a blessing to be here and transition to news, and I wouldn’t change anything really.

Albert Kim: Now is that pretty typical of local news folks is to try and always go to the next bigger gig or bigger market? If so you sort of bucked that trend because you found a good gig.

Kevin Nathan: Yeah, I mean absolutely. To me, bigger isn’t always better. I think life balance is really important. You know a lot of people who go to that proverbial next level may sacrifice something else in their life. You know, if you can have it all, that’s great. But as we all know, as we get older, most things come with a sacrifice on some end of your life; there are only so many hours in the day. So yeah, I guess in some level I took the road less traveled ’cause I was relatively young; I was 28 when I got here. Had I pursued opportunities diligently, maybe something would have panned out in a bigger market. But you know, the things that the students really need to know is that if you’re passionate about broadcasting, you can do good TV, good radio, good journalism, and newspaper print, whatever it may be anywhere. It’s really about the story that you have, that hopefully you came up with and presented and how well you want to tell it. Just because you add fancy call letters to your resume doesn’t necessarily make you any better at telling a story.

Albert Kim: So tell us how you kind of got to NBC Connecticut here in Connecticut. Did you work at other markets? What was your college background and was that your sort of goal to work in TV news?

Kevin Nathan: So I was pretty fortunate and blessed, Al, ’cause I was really young when I knew I wanted to get into sports. I was a kid; I was 7-8-9 years old. Wanted to get into sports Broadcasting, but I took the road on little, little less traveled in that I didn’t go to a traditional broadcast journalism school or communications school. I majored in English in college at a smaller liberal arts College in Pennsylvania, Dickinson College. I wanted to play sports in college as they often jumped into this Division III and the only reason I was in Division III was because it was no Division IV. It was a place where I could play 2 sports. I did the school radio station, school paper. Got experience and then. You know problems a little bit behind. A student may become from thru a strong journalism program where we had hands on experience, but I was able to get my foot in the door. And that’s a key thing pursuit. She’s get your foot in the door at a little TV station, Martinsburg, WV; started there doing everything except sportscasting. But then the main person left after six months. I got bumped up, went from there to Utica, NY, another small market; then to Huntington WV – a medium size market. Then I got to Hartford in ’96. So you know that’s part of the advice: today you have to be willing to start somewhere. First job was, you know, $16,000 a year; the second job was $13,006.00 an hour. You know not to talk money but it just shows you have to be willing to take any price. Start somewhere and then grow and you can go anywhere.

Albert Kim: So since you have landed here in Hartford and spent like you said nearly quarter century at NBC, you’ve done a lot of sportscasting. You’ve been on the news desk now. Tell us about maybe some of the big memories or big stories or “brushes with greatness” that you’ve had; that kind of standout moments in your broadcasting career.

Kevin Nathan: I mean from the sports standpoint, sort of chronologically from my time in Hartford. I guess you know… The first biggie would be 1999, UConn Men when they won the first of four national Championships (a lot of your students weren’t even born then!) Duke had a basketball team that some were claiming and proclaiming was the best ever. I mean, they were absolutely loaded. I think they had one loss in the entire season. UConn only had two losses, and UCONN knocked them off 77 to 74. I still think that might be the number one sports moment in the history of our state, with all due respect to Gino’s 11 national championships; anything the Whalers have done; the first men’s national championship with something a lot of people thought they’d never see. 2002 I got to go to my fo first Winter Olympics, first Olympics experience – the first of five. And Jimmy Shea, a local guy must Harford won the gold medal and skeleton sledding into that. And he was the first third generation Olympian when he won the gold by I think was five one-hundreths of a second. He took a picture out of his late Grandfather who’d been killed by a drunk driver just weeks before the Olympics, and again first third generation Olympian. So there was just this emotional moment and those are the moments we look in broadcasting ’cause emotion is how we all connect as human beings, even in a in a Covid world and you don’t have to be a sports fan to have connected with that moment with Jimmy Shea. Now all the Travelers Championships, especially with Phil Mickelson. One – I love a lefty. He won a couple in Cromwell. I went in ’02 to all the subsequent Olympics, London in ’12; Russia in ’14; Rio in ’16; South Korea in 2018… UConn beating Notre Dame football at Notre Dame. I was at that game on the sideline. That was in 2009, the same year that UConn Football player Jasper Howard was murdered on campus. You know the thing about covering sports is generally those memories are when you got people on their best day. The Red Sox breaking the curse.

I was on the field in St. Louis when they won, in the locker room. The transition to news is that you know we’re covering the Dulous murder case in real time on a family’s worst day. We’re covering COVID-19 Pandemic the likes of which the world hasn’t seen in 100 years, but cover the important questions we’re having now about race in our society and the subsequent protests that have gone on. I mean historical moments, some of which are poignant and make us think certainly in the case of race relations. But in the case of Covid and certainly the Dulous murder situation. I mean these are sad. These are tragic situations and so it’s a different tone, but it still fits under that umbrella of emotion and how to connect with the viewer. Look, there’s been no shortage of these sports stories in Connecticut of the last 24 plus years, that’s for sure.

Albert Kim: I always love that you have been an adjunct for us in the recent past, where you teach a Sports on TV class. Hopefully we’ll get to offer that again sometime in the near future, but I’ve always loved being able to say, yeah, Kevin nathan teaches that; he’s a sportscaster. You know, he’s a newscaster. NBC Connecticut. He’s going to the Super Bowl this weekend! And so you’ll get to watch him and then you’ll see him in class that Wednesday after. (Still there, yeah, still here, sorry. You paused for a sec; OK, we’re back.) So I love that you know you are working in the field, but you come and teach students here at MCC.

Kevin Nathan: Yeah, you know it’s been a blessing and I hope that you know over time that it comes back. I think first of all, it’s good to share. Look, you know I don’t know how long I’m gonna be on this earth and we can’t take whatever we learn to our grave and as long as we accumulate knowledge I think it’s important to share and mentor. But I would also say that I feed off the students. I learn from things I feed off their energy and I think when you teach something… I found that what I was those semesters where I had a class I was holding myself more accountable as a broadcaster. I’m going for my 930am class telling my students – hey: rule number one, understand your audience. You know who is that listener; who was that viewer? How do you connect to them and if I’m not living that back at the station later that day. So I think it forced me to think about things that I was teaching on them. Am I really doing this every day in my job consistently? Practice what you preach. So I hope that it comes back someday because students are great. I I love kind of the grit at MCC. You know these are students that are in many cases puttin’ themselves through college. Most students have to work and I know that’s challenging for a lot of young people. Or maybe you’re middle aged, even going back to school taking classes. But I respect that and I think that “educational grit,” if that’s such a thing, will serve you well. I think that things are handed to you too easily. You don’t appreciate things. That was my experience at MCC; that people have that grit and tenacity; want to work and and appreciate people like you and me that want to come in and share and teach them so… It has been a great experience and I wanna say it was ’cause I still feel like someday we will get back and they’ll be an opportunity to teach again.

Albert Kim: So you’re working today. Yeah, you look very nice. Ready to go on the air soon.

Kevin Nathan: It’s all the makeup!

Albert Kim: That’s it! And so, tell us a little bit about what your typical day is going to be like today before you go on the air, and then when can we find you on the air?

Kevin Nathan: Sure, so my typical day is anchoring 11:00 AM news, the 4:00 PM news, and the 5:30 news. The 11A is generally an hour – solo anchor. The 4:00 o’clock news in a co-anchor with Leslie Mays. My dear friend, Kerri-Lee Mayland, is on a leave, she’s working out some some medical stuff and looks like she’s going to be OK; nothing life threatening, she’s been public about that. And then 5:30, I co-anchor with Leslie as well. And you never know what the day is going to bring. I mean, we’ve had a lot of days at 4:00 o’clock, where the governor has done news conferences, which is on some level preempting to what we’ve done. We’re trying to balance, now you know, what is the governor going to say? How urgent is it we need to carry the governor from our show, or can listen to the first 10 minutes, take a few questions and then dump out of it? Or do we need to take the whole thing? Once, at the beginning of Covid, we were taking the news feed, the news conferences in their entirety, so my day will be after this. You know, I’ll get back into the rundowns and look at the lead story. All the stories that are producers are putting in and just trying to understand them. You know, do they make sense to me? If they don’t make sense to me, they’re not going to make sense to the viewer. Connect everything properly. Does it flow? Does it come off the tongue easily? Can I make it more clear and concise? Is there anything I can add? Is there an opportunity maybe for a moment of humor, levity, or maybe something more poignant to react to? I try not to script those moments too much. You like, you want them to happen organically. So they feel authentic and real, but you also want to pay attention enough to go alright, we’re doing, you know this cute story about whatever it is. This will be an opportunity to react. Maybe not script it, but just know in the back of your mind – if time warrants, there’s a chance to have some fun. Because look, we’re in a world right now, with a lot of serious stuff, doom and gloom. We could have a little levity, when we can smile a little bit. I think that’s important.

Albert Kim: What about the sort of overall state of the TV industry? Because you know that sort of destination watching where people are may not have the time or desire per se to tune into you at 4:00 or at 5:30, which is a crime. They should, but what is it about, you know the next 5, 10, 20 years about TV is going to change? Stay the same? Improve? Is it going to decrease? What do you think from where you sit?

Kevin Nathan: Well, as a former I (well, I won’t call you old), but as a former, you know that long life long radio person… You know, people said radio was dead 40 years ago and it still has a pretty strong and relevant existence. I hope and want to think that TV will be much the same. People have been calling for its demise for a long time. I think it’s key that we continue to be proactive with the digital side. You know, we may still have all these newscasts, but we may be taking bigger chunks or even paring those chunks down and putting them out digitally, so that our viewers can get that information and consume it wherever they are, whenever they want it to. To a large degree, we’re already doing that. Maybe less with the anchors before with the reporting side, so I could see the evolving that way. I don’t see the human need for storytelling of local news going anywhere. It’s going to be there. I think that gazillion dollar questions, Al, are: how will it be monetized and how will be distributed? How you gonna make money on it and where does it go and how does it all get consumed? But you know, I, I think on some level I don’t necessarily have numbers to back it up, but I think in a Covid situation where more people are working from home, one question might be when people watch news? Historically your 11:00 PM late local news is the news of record for the day.

You know, we have more people watching the 11:00 AM to 4:00 PM that could serve working remotely and they want to break here. So rest in the sea. I can put up with bigger level of bigger picture if TV exactly is start to say, you know, maybe we put our gig promotable piece of 5:00 PM in the afternoon and not 11:00 PM at night. Are Viewer habits going to change or people still getting up at 430 in the morning to commute or are fewer people commuting and working from home? Yeah. I still think TV will have a place. I think for the context of this audience and the students, you know… The key is it was relevant 30 years ago to more relevant now. We need to do a little bit of everything and do it well. You need to shoot. You need to edit. You need to know how to write. You need to go and tell a story. I mean at 52 and anchoring now I’m not shooting and editing as I was in sports, but if I’m fortunate enough to go back to Olympics, I probably will have to do both so I know how to edit. I used to know how to shoot. I have to relearn that. So multitasking being an MMJ, a multimedia journalist is a pretty important thing if you’re a young person getting in. You know I’m old enough, or maybe I can get to the proverbial finish line, without having to revisit a lot of those skills. But if you’re 22 years old and you have a 40 year timeline, let’s say to do this, you need to to master those skills. So my advice would be if you’re serious about this, pick up the camera, learn the editing tools. We are much more savvy with technology than it was (it took me 10 minutes just to get on a zoom call here!) So you know master those skills where it’s second nature, like riding a bike and then you can put the polish on later and have fun with the on air stuff. Get to know the fundamentals first.

Albert Kim: What an amazing, some recommendations to end on! Kevin Nathan, NBC Connecticut news anchor, a great journalist, great friend. Thank you so much for sharing your time and your experiences with our students. I know it’s going to be great. Have a great show tonight and tomorrow, and for as long as you can do this! (Thank you before we go, I want to try and get a picture!)

Hello everyone, thanks for tuning in. I’m your host Connie and today I’ll be talking about the past, present and future of the mass medium – books. Let’s jump right into it.

So there’s a free textbook out there. It was written in 2016 an it’s called “Understanding Media and Culture – an Introduction to Mass Communication” and it talks about the history of books in which their origins can be traced back to the ancient Egyptians (sings “walk like an Egyptian”) with their use of reed pens and papyrus scrolls. Standard scroll for about the time was about 30 feet. The longest scrolls archaeologists have uncovered stretch over 133 feet. Wow, talk about a heavy read, right? Papyrus was eventually replaced by the codex, which can be compared to today’s books with their similar structure – they were more portable, sturdier, an easier to store.

During the Middle Ages, books were handwritten and painstakingly decorated by monks and monasteries, making them super expensive, and not widely available. Yeah, literacy was something only those are the elite that enjoyed; those are the wealthy, upperclassmen and those religious type peoples. Which leads me to one of the most important invention in history: Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press in 1448. This revolutionized how books were made, distributed, and read for centuries. Afterwards they were cheaper to make and produce. So information and books were spread more efficiently and more readily available for us common folk.

Yes, literacy rates went up for poor and as well as children and women – whoo! Yeah, in my opinion, being able to read is probably one of the most greatest gifts life has to offer.

So with millions of books circulating the globe throughout time and even now, we are living in a digital age. So how are books really doing these days when everyone and their mother is glued to anything with a screen? Well, according to the latest trends in books, e-books and audio books, which is an article I found on Information Today, more than two-thirds of the world’s 7.6 billion people will have a mobile device. Yeah, the masses really do love an affordable data plan. So to quote the article, “the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the most recent American Time Use Survey shows that in 2017 there is a continuing decline in leisure reading. A record low of 19% of Americans age 15 and older reported that they read for pleasure. Balancing this is a rise and television viewing, which is nearly ten times the amount of time devoted to reading.”

Wow, I was super depressed to read this because personally I love to read and collect books. Yeah, so I guess I’m part of that 19%! Fun fact about me: I’ve got a mini library in my apartment, and not to be cliche or anything, there’s just something about the smell of them, the weight in my hand, the occasional paper cut and cover art that’s just irreplaceable by E books and audio books. But I guess that’s where people are going to for reading these days with e-books, having made $167 million in sales in 2017 and now nearly one in five Americans now listen to audiobooks. But as you continue the article, it also mentions that 67% of Americans read a physical book in 2018. So that means print still dominates. That makes my book lover heart super happy.

So with all this in mind, what direction should we expect books to be headed in our future? Well, there’s a fascinating article that I read on Reuters.com about a brand new library that opened in Florida. It was at Florida Polytechnic University and this futuristic library does not have a single physical book. That’s right, it’s fully digital. So instead of librarians putting books on shelves, the library is giving us that budget and students get to pick and choose books that are relevant to their needs, so I can’t really argue about how convenient and efficient that system is. But there are still downsides to going digital. Digitizing for one increases screen time, which can negatively impact your health as it’s straining for your eyes, amongst other things. There is also going to be difficulty preserving information as technology changes as it constantly does. And also having to pay annual licensing fees can end up being more costly in the long run and you don’t even own it. Moreover, according to an article that compares e-reading to print books on custommade.com, e-books are not actually proven to be more eco-friendly than print. Yeah, hate to break it to you, but it takes 33 pounds of minerals, including some toxic and conflict minerals to produce one e-reader, whereas producing a book uses about two-thirds of a pound of minerals and two gallons of water. Yikes, that is going to leave one big carbon footprint.

Anyway, books have come a long way an I’m kind of eager to see what the future has in store for them. Some people claim that, in their current paper format, books are likely to disappear in the next 20 to 25 years. But in my opinion, I think books still have some fight left, so I guess we just have to see.

I’m Connie, and that about wraps it up for today. Thanks for listening.

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Did you know you can earn a certificate in Media technology at Manchester Community College in only 18 credits? At Manchester Community College, you can learn practical skills in video, television and audio production, screenwriting and public speaking, not to mention a hands-on internship that provides real-world experience with some of Connecticut’s most prestigious media companies. New opportunities, networking and valuable experience awaits you at Manchester Community College! Go to manchestercc.edu and search communication.

Hey, are you looking for ICE TV studio? You can follow me. It can be difficult to find at first,
but if you take the hallway right by the elevator in the Learning Resource Center, you will find it in no time.

At our studio we film interviews, news shows, and other fun clips.

In addition to filming, hands on experience, and talent on camera,
the ICE TV Club is a great way to meet new people and make friends.

What’s up MCC, follow me into B-113 and meet the wonderful ICE TV Crew and the marvelous Professor Kim.

For more information about ICE TV at Manchester Community College, please contact:
Professor Albert Kim, Faculty Advisor – ICE TV and ICE Radio at MCC
akim@manchestercc.edu, 860-512-2797

Transcript: They’re coming to get you Barbara… They’re coming to get you Barbara… (woman screams)

Description: In black and white, various students act like zombies and move their hands toward the camera as it pans past them, from left to right. The camera then zooms out from a white poster with red text that says “Night of the Living Dead; Mon 10/22; 3:30-6 pm; GPA Commons”. Professor Albert Kim is holding this poster and smiling, but as the camera continues to zoom out the zombie students appear from behind Albert and he looks increasingly frightened.