montanajournalism Awards, Feature, J-School, Student

Sarah Yovetich: Covering Breaking News & Winning A Hearst Award Too

selfie of Sarah Yovetich
Photo by Sarah Yovetich.

Commercial radio may be Sarah Yovetich’s first love, but a story she produced for UM News in the fall semester won 12th place in the Hearst Awards TV News category. The piece, “Budget Cuts Result From Decreased Enrollment, State Funding at University of Montana,” took three weeks of research, interviews and editing to compact the news into a minute and 36-second long story.

Yovetich’s photographer for the piece, Peter Riley, pitched the idea after the budget cuts were released right before Thanksgiving break. “We never thought anything was going to come out of it,” Yovetich said. But the campus unrest that followed proved otherwise.

“It’s not just teachers that care, but students,” Yovetich said. “It proved enrollment’s a thing to be worried about.”

However, her research took a step back from the students and staff responding to the university’s proposed budget cuts capture a broader perspective and ask the question, “were the budget cuts out of line?”

“This was a strong story because Sarah found a new angle on UM’s budget cuts by digging into the history of state funding for higher education,” said Ray Fanning, associate professor who co-teaches UM News. “She discovered that at the same time enrollment was falling, the state legislature was reducing its allocation to UM.”

Ray Ekness, who co-teaches UM News with Fanning, agreed. “Sarah did some really good work in UM News this past semester, and it’s nice to see that she’s being recognized for that.”

Yovetich’s worked with Ekness ever since her first introductory journalism class, and she dropped her political science and business majors to switch to journalism. “I loved him and everyone in the journalism department,” Yovetich said. “I really lucked out finding journalism.”

During the summer between her freshman and sophomore year, Yovetich worked as a campus anchor for Montana Public Radio, and since then she’s transitioned to other commercial radio stations in Missoula. She covers news stories for KGVO during the week as an on-air broadcaster and reporter. “Some of the newscasts I do everyday are sent state-wide, so you’ll be able to hear me in different cities, which is kind of cool.”

On weekends, she turns into a DJ for the show “Campus Connection” on 107.5 ZooFM. Yovetich said, “I love relating my life to others and connecting with the community.”

Back on campus, Yovetich just finished serving a full year as the president of the Alpha Phi sorority’s Chi Chapter. The sorority’s helped her with scholarships and academics, as well as serving as a second family to her. Yovetich helped return the support to her sisters through motivational Instagram posts that share her dedication to power-lifting regimes. She now holds five state records in the squat, bench press, and dead lift.

“It’s hard being a senior and balancing that stuff,” Yovetich said. “School’s definitely taking a precedence this year.”

When she graduates in May, Yovetich’s ready to take her journalism skills beyond Missoula. She’s staying open to opportunities in both broadcast and radio fields to continue gaining more experience.

“She’s always been working in things like radio,” Ekness said. “Now she’s stepping out in television, so it’s kind of exciting for us.”

Tune into 107.5 ZooFM on Saturdays and Sundays from 10am-3pm to hear Sarah Yovetich hosting the “Campus Connection.”

By Jana Wiegand
montanajournalism Awards, Feature, Graduate, J-School, Student

J-School Grad Student Wins Best In Festival For Radio Piece

photo of Ouellet working in the studio
Photo by Shanti Johnson.

From the blue lights and glow-sticks at The Great Northern Bar in Whitefish, Montana, graduate student Nicky Ouellet followed a band backstage to understand the mission behind their music. Ouellet’s subsequent radio story, “An ‘80s Cover Band With Global Dreams,” recently won Best in Festival in the student news competition for the Broadcast Education Association’s Festival of Media Arts.

“This is one of my first audio pieces,” Ouellet said. “For it to receive national recognition like this is really overwhelming, and I’m really honored.”

The story emerged from Assistant Professor Jule Banville’s Advanced Audio Skills class, when Banville prompted her students to incorporate music into a radio piece. “I wanted mine to be more than just a story about a band,” Ouellet said. “And the New Wave Time Trippers immediately came to mind.”

While the band came together for their mutual love for ‘80s music, they also wanted to find a way to be able to live off their “Rocky Horror Picture Show” style performances. Members of the New Wave Time Trippers told Ouellet that they hoped to turn these occasional night gigs into a full-time job by playing at corporate events and landing a regular show in Las Vegas.

“I thought it was a really interesting combination of the artsy, but also the business savvy,” Ouellet said.

For her, capturing a sense of place was equally as important as recording the essence of the Time Tripper’s music. Ouellet plugged a Marantz kit directly into the bar’s sound system to record clean copies of the songs and set up a secondary recorder to capture the crowd’s experience. After taping two of their shows, one in Whitefish and one in Missoula, Ouellet spent hours listening to the footage, recording her own narration and trying to keep the story under five minutes.

“Most of the challenges were really just keeping it tight and clean and focused,” Ouellet said. “That’s where Jule, my professor, came in and helped me kill all of my darlings, which was a really tough process because there were a lot of good ones.”

“I loved that story, and it will make you happy if you listen to it,” Banville said. “It had this signature mix where Nicky blended her writing and narration with interviews, and of course, great songs.”

The intimacy of radio originally drew Ouellet to the medium. She said the power of each story to delve inside someone else’s head made her change the way she saw the world. “You kind of lose sense of the thing directly in front of you, and it’s like this whole world of your mind and that of the story-teller are blended,” Ouellet explained.

Since the Time Tripper piece, she and Banville have been working closely together on Ouellet’s professional portfolio, which she will defend in May to receive her master’s degree in journalism. Her portfolio includes both written and audio pieces, examining how Native Americans manage natural resources on tribal lands. Ouellet is currently applying to jobs and fellowships for after graduation, and she hopes to find a position that lets her continue to use both print and radio.

“I’ve met very few people who work a story like Nicky Ouellet,” Banville said. “She’s going to do amazing things and just kill it as a journalist who can do it all.”

To hear more about Nicky Ouellet’s Best in Festival piece and the production process, watch her video interview on the School of Journalism’s Vimeo account, or click here to read the transcript of her interview. See more of Nicky Ouellet’s work in print and radio on her blog’s portfolio.

Stay up to date with more UM J-School radio pieces by listening to Jule Banville’s podcast series Last Best Stories.

By Jana Wiegand
montanajournalism Awards, J-School, Student

J-School Alum Makes Top 10 List For Hearst Radio Awards

Emily Proctor talked with Vietnam War veteran Roger Cox for an hour and a half with the recorder running. She cut these 90 minutes down to three minutes and thirty-seven seconds of Cox’s own narrative, not adding a word of her own. The final piece, “Roger Cox’s Vietnam,” was one of two stories she submitted to the 2015 Hearst Journalism Awards Program. On February 3rd, 2016, the Hearst Radio News and Features competition ranked Proctor 9th in the nation.

hearst logo

“I had an ah-ha moment with this piece,” Proctor said. “It totally changed what I wanted to do with my career.”

Over the course of the interview Proctor probed deeper into Cox’s memories as a marine in the Vietnam War. As she edited the piece, she listened to the moments where Cox’s stolid replies began to falter. Proctor felt the power of Cox’s voice and the emotion it carried without needing any extra narrative.

Assistant Professor Jule Banville, who worked with Proctor on the story as part of her Intermediate Audio class, watched Proctor’s interest in radio grow. “He was just really honest with her about what happened there and what he thinks about it now,” Banville said. “And because what she produced was his voice telling his story, it had so much more power for her than any journalism she’d done before. It just clicked.”

The story aired on the podcast Last Best Stories, and the full interview can be accessed through the Veterans History Project.

Since graduating last May, Proctor’s been working on some independent radio projects, including a Montana-themed piece about the modern cowboy. This summer she will be doing more radio work in Alaska and potentially connecting with J-school alum Ruth Eddy, who works at a public radio station in Ketchikan. However, Proctor’s next major goal involves going to graduate school for audio design, hopefully in Germany or New Zealand, she said.

When Proctor studied abroad in Athens, Greece, she shot a short documentary about the smoking culture and its importance to their society. She also tried to produce some audio stories, but said, “The language barrier made it hard to do good radio.”

Proctor addressed this issue again in the second story she submitted to the 2015 Hearst Awards, a piece called “Language Is No Barrier For Senior Companions.” The story centers on Frank Havlik, a native from the Czech Republic who now lives in Missoula and volunteers as a Senior Companion. Coming from Stanford, Montana, Proctor was conscious of the fact that her Montana audience wasn’t used to hearing a heavy Czech accent, so she took care choosing the most enunciated sound bites.

“I wanted to cover all my bases and make sure people understood the story,” Proctor said. She added her own voice-over narrative and provided a complete transcript when the story aired on MTPR on April 28th, 2015.

“I’m pretty insanely proud of her,” Banville said. “She went on to intern at Montana Public Radio, so she’s got some news chops too, and I’m so glad the judges recognized her talent.”

By Jana Wiegand