TV Production Students Start Tritoncast News

by Emilie Jenson, Public Information Office
Posted on 10/24/2023

Iowa Central’s TV Production students have launched a new way to share campus happenings at Iowa Central.

A new newscast, known as Tritoncast, is recorded every Friday morning and highlights events and news through the eyes of Iowa Central students. 

The TV Production class, made up of mostly sophomores, works together to generate story ideas and write scripts which then become hands-on homework assignments.

“The students do their own script writing,” said Nikki Rasmussen, TV and Radio Production Program Coordinator. “Participation and submission are a huge part of the class, but they (students) also listen and discuss, what are our students talking about on campus?”

The stories are then turned into scripts, and like a real-life television station, are placed on teleprompters for the week’s anchors to read while on camera.

The TV station recently found a new home in a space formerly occupied by art classrooms on the first floor of the Liberal Arts and Sciences Building. It features all the equipment that would be found in a traditional TV newsroom: cameras, teleprompters, tricasters and an anchor desk.

“We’ve been in our new location for about a month,” Rasmussen said. “It’s worked well for us; we were able to make use of an empty space and get the studio and anchor desk down to a more visible area on campus.”

Each week during the Friday morning newscast, students rotate through the various roles in the production studio to gain experience in anchoring, recording, editing, and operating the behind-the-scenes equipment.

“Everything is hands-on, they’re getting real, firsthand production experience,” said Rasmussen. “You can read about it, but these are skills you can’t learn from a book. It’s all trial and error, learning as they go.”

“They can’t just teach this in class,” said sophomore Devin Robinson-Smith, who was one of the anchors in a recent Tritoncast episode. “It’s all real-world experience, you have to do it to learn it, that is what I like about it.”

“It’s been a fun learning experience so far,” said Leynie Alfaro, a digital media major. “Running a teleprompter was easier than I thought it would be.”

“Having a student run newscast was an idea that had been in the works for a number of years,” said Rasmussen, who is in her second year leading the TV and Radio Programs. “Digital Media is a growing area and this year we have enough kids that we were able to make that happen.”

The Tritoncast can be seen on the student media YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/@IowaCentralTritonStudentMedia with new episodes added weekly on Fridays.