BBN Starts Off New Year with a New Organizational System

By Michelle Doan, Visual Arts Manager

The Baron Broadcast News (BBN) has been popular and a success with the student body and teachers, and this school year has been no exception. Still, the BBN is looking to raise the bar of quality for news, public service announcements (PSAs), and entertainment. As a start of the new year, the members and advisor Sean Ziebarth discussed a new mission statement, system of organization, and spread of leadership to help solidify the BBN\’s foundation.

The BBN always had a mission statement, created by the previous advisor, Mike Poff, who retired in June 2009, as a guideline to creating their clips and segments, but none of the students ever knew what that mission statement was, leaving its foundation flexible and unstable. Executive Producer Joanne Vo recently recreated its mission statement to redefine how the BBN runs: to educate, inform, support, serve, and entertain, respectively in matter of importance. Controversy over the importance of humorous entertainment to the teenage student body versus so-called “boring” PSAs and news stories erupted among the members, but after some understanding, all agreed to the new mission statement as a new foundation for BBN in the future.

“I want to try this out now,” says co-executive producer Jessica Herman (\’10) “because I want to make things easier and better for the members next year.”

Along with a new mission statement, new positions and sections were created to help spread around the leadership. Generally, the BBN would always consists of one or two producers, maybe a few veteran members also looked up too like the producers, a cabinet manager (for the film equipment), an advisor, and the rest of the team members. During publication times to release the next episode, the producers and the veterans would stay up as late as four or six in the morning just to edit the members\’ segments, edit the timeline, render the episode, burn it to DVD, and make around 20 to 30 DVD copies.

“I have so much to do as a producer,” says Herman, “It is just so stressful and time-consuming. I\’m just spreading the work around, so Joanne [Vo (\'10), co-executive producer] and I could have some slack.”

Members now are assigned to sections or positions such as graphics design, assembly management, technology management, and more. The credit roll for new BBN episodes starting from the last one on Friday, January 15 includes each member\’s name, as usual, along with their new positions and what segments they worked on as a sense of motivation for improvement.

“It will give [them] a sense of competition,” says co-episode producer Sean Nguyen (\’10), “to improve their clips and to try to make it as best quality as possible so the whole student body can see their clip.”

Compared to last year, the student ratings for the BBN have gone up. When asked what the new members thought about the BBN during the summer camp before the 2009 – 2010 school year started, many complained about the audio problems and how many of their English classes were bored of the episodes due their lower-than-expected quality. This year, the veteran members were able to expand their team with more experienced and creative members, and occasions of complaints about the audio problems are rarer.

And even though the BBN “is already doing a great job entertaining the student body,” like sports anchor Brooklyn Paxson (\’10) says, there is always room for improvement.

The film team will give the new spread of leadership and the mission statement a “trial run” and hope that it will become the foundation for future BBN staff and episodes.