{"id":13869,"date":"2012-10-24T00:02:15","date_gmt":"2012-10-24T10:02:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hawaii.carpentermediagroup.com\/midweekpro\/?p=13869"},"modified":"2012-10-23T11:36:11","modified_gmt":"2012-10-23T21:36:11","slug":"the-start-of-something-big","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hawaii.carpentermediagroup.com\/midweekpro\/the-start-of-something-big\/","title":{"rendered":"The Start Of Something Big"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Bob Jones with current Waianae High journalism students. Photo courtesy Searider Productions<\/p><\/div>\n

When you get to my age, you start to wonder if you’ve done anything really helpful for others with your life. I tend to feel best about News 101 and Waianae High School.<\/p>\n

The year was 1992. I was at KGMB-TV and got a bug to let high schools pick a news topic, produce a two-minute story, and I’d run one every Friday on our newscasts. Students would select the topics, shoot and edit. My only rules were no slander, no profanity, no nudity. Then-DOE chief Charles Toguchi went along with it.<\/p>\n

I started with Waianae High. Some administrators in that district didn’t think Waianae could handle it. I mean … it was Waianae. A Spanish teacher, Candy Suiso, agreed to take it on as a no-extra-pay activity. The rest of the story is like somebody starting off with homemade electronic gear in the garage and ending up as Apple or Microsoft.<\/p>\n

Elementary cameras and little technical knowledge grew into Searider Productions – a multimedia empire at the school that does the newspaper, daily in-school TV productions, Hiki No stories for PBS-Hawaii, graphic design and even training videos for Halekulani hotel and American Savings Bank. There’s a wall full of national award plaques, 300 students, eight full-time teachers, two stand-alone buildings, and Candy Suiso is now the paid program administrator.<\/p>\n

The Searider Productions quarters has banks of huge computer screens and projects brimming over. Our taxes only paid for about 5 percent of that. The other 95 percent came from grants and private foundations!<\/p>\n

“All these classes (journalism, video, photography, graphic design) are electives,” says video production teacher John Allen, a ’97 grad. “If you want to be in this program you work after school, on weekends and on holidays.”<\/p>\n

It’s the first journalism program in the Hawaii DOE to combine print, video and the Internet.<\/p>\n

What students turn out is of such high quality that companies inquire if the graduating high-schoolers want to work for them. “We tell them we prefer to have our students go to college first,” says Allen.<\/p>\n

And there’s now a for-profit spinoff from Searider Productions called Makaha Studios doing video productions and multimedia design.<\/p>\n

The school paper, Ka Leo, <\/I>has expanded its coverage beyond campus to the entire Waianae Coast. And last year, the prestigious Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice & Human Rights gave students Aaron Oshiro, Cody Kau, Michael Gooch and Jenna Munoz the American High School Broadcast Award for a feature on MA’O Farms.<\/p>\n

All this began with a dozen students, an overworked Spanish teacher and people up the ladder who thought it could not be done.<\/p>\n

I believed it could.<\/p>\n\n

Want me to talk to your civic club about my new book REPORTER <\/I>– unredacted stories of my 55 years in journalism? You’ll get an earful! Contact me at the email address below.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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