BYU-Idaho Radio student reporters are going more in-depth with the local stories they cover. BYU-Idaho Radio recently launched a new radio show on KBYI 94.3 FM called, “Tell Me About It.” The new show is produced and co-hosted by Radio News and Programming Coordinator Brandon Isle, and BYU-Idaho Radio student employees. The program is made up of student-written stories and packages, interviews, and contributing faculty.
“‘Tell Me About It’ is different, new, and exciting because this is a whole half-hour of just our own, student-produced content. Other shows we run only leave us with two-minute breaks for our own content here and there. But ‘Tell Me About It’ is all us, produced and run by students,” Isle said.
The 30-minute radio program airs on Fridays from 4:00 p.m. until 4:30 p.m., replacing a portion of NPR’s ‘All Things Considered.’ ‘Tell Me About It’ is broken into three segments. The first five-minutes is a fast-paced newscast with the daily headlines, followed by a short local weather report. Following a 30-second commercial break, the show continues with a segment that includes recent news packages produced by student reporters. The last portion of the program is called, “Media Matters,” a prerecorded segment with adjunct faculty member, Michelle Mead. In this segment, Isle and Mead talk about media-related news.
The radio station employs a dozen students every semester; two of them produce music programming, while the other 10 are involved in news production as reporters, hosts, and producers.
Student Bryanna Willis worked as the radio station’s intern and producer during the Fall 2018 Semester. Willis has been an employee of the radio station for two years and has done just about every job a student employee at the radio station can do.
“This experience will be really beneficial for my future career, because I am able to say that I helped put together a whole radio show without help or input from outside sources like NPR. It just gives me more experience and practice to work on live radio and make fewer mistakes on air. It can be kind of scary, but working on this program shows that I am willing and able to do things that are new and scary,” Willis said.
Isle created this show to give his student employees more “real-world” experience. Because this newscast is live, student employees experience co-hosting and working with another person on the timing. These are useful skills not just for students who go into a career in broadcast radio, but for those who spend any amount of time writing and working in teams.
“This has helped us inject a little more energy into our work. Any job can get monotonous, but with this, we need new stories every week. So, there are deadlines that need to be met, rather than taking time with a story and getting to it when we can,” Isle said.
If you aren’t available to listen on Fridays at 4:00 p.m., the show is uploaded to Soundcloud so it can be accessed on demand as a podcast on any podcast app.
“While this features more than just BYU-Idaho stories, we do want to heavily feature BYU-Idaho campus news stories. If any faculty have story ideas or would like to be contributors, they can contact the radio station, so they can ‘tell us about it,’” said Isle.
Brandon Isle can be contacted at 208-496-2022 or isleb@byui.edu.