Northwest Missouri State University - Tower Yearbook (Maryville, MO)

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LEFT: Jay Liebenguth reads wire copy in preparation for an Alive and Living feature Liebenguth is the researcher for the radio magazine BELOW LEFT: Perry Echelberger, executive director, interviews Dr Carroll Fry for his explanation of current trends in the film industry. Fry is a regular contributor to Alive and Living. BELOW: Jocelyn Cordray answers questions from Kevin Brunner in a feature on childhood memories. The student-produced features usually had student quote s in them. I Combs O Cieseke BROADCAST SERVICES 19

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Alive and Living: Airborne magazine Pick any topic and you can bet that KXCV ' s Alive and Living has done a feature on it. We have done features on everything imaginable, said Perry Echelberger, executive director of Alive and Living. We have done everything from snow ice cream to politics, from consumerism of the housewife to gay rights in Missouri. We have done film reviews and virtually every subject you could think of. Alive and Living was a student-produced radio magazine that was aired seven days a week. It was on from 8 till noon. Last year, for the first time, Alive and Living was aired at night. The program was he ard on every third Thursday of the month. This program was an hour long with no music, Echelberger said. Some of our best features were during this hour, and we introduced new things that we would sometimes use in the morning show. Alive and Living consisted of 10 feature spots during the morning programming hours. Music and news were mixed with the three- to five-minute features. What we were trying to do with the show was to make things more interesting and informative, Echel- berger said. We tried to do this by making the features short, so if the listeners got tired of one thing, they knew it would be over with soon. There also might be something else they liked around the corner. The Alive and Living staff was comprised of 10 to 15 student producers. Two or three of these students did all of the features for a certain day. Four or five of the 10 features were locally produced. The rest came over the network wire. The network sent over features and we listened to them and put the best on the air, Echelberger said. Occasionally though, we would do a whole show of locally produced features. The Alive and Living staff also had 10 local contributors to the 18 BROADCAST SERVICES program. Some of the features were localized, so members of the staff talked to the NWMSU faculty. Dr. (Richard) Fulton was our political analyst, and Dr. (Carroll) Fry was our film reviewer. We did this because our thrust was to try to talk to the people of northwest Missouri, Echelberger said. Features on Playboy, Pearl Harbor Day and Dr. Martin Luther King ' s birthday were some of the locally produced shows. We basically tried to talk about things that we thought would be of interest to our listeners, Echel- berger said. The staff also tried to coincide the programs with world events. When Playboy was celebrating its 25th anniversary, a whole show was locally produced on the magazine. It took me two months to do the Playboy feature, Toby Miller, a student producer, said. I had to interview a bunch of Playmates. That was my big feature of the year.

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Block and white and new all over New leadership accompanied by a different format changed the direction of the Northwest Mis- sourian. The trend today is for a more visible means of communication in print journalism, said Suzanne Cruzen, editor. After spending the summer thinking about what she wanted the paper to be, Cruzen chose a newsmagazine format. It ' s becoming a popular format now, and I felt as if we could do it too, she said. First-year adviser Mike Sherer also thought this was the way the Missourian should turn. This is becoming a visually oriented world, said Sherer. No one is going to bother with the publication if it doesn ' t look good. A major part of this change was the use of full-page pictures on the front page. One of the major problems we had this year was convincing veteran staff members that the front page picture didn ' t take away from news coverage, said Cruzen. It was more of a promo for our inside pages and wasn ' t used as a filler. Aside from the new format, the Missourian faced a change in staff as Sherer became adviser following the resignation of Linda Smith. I really enjoyed the work, said Sherer. About the only problem I had was realizing the need for more than 24 hours in a day to put out a quality publication. Freshmen made up the meat of the 25-member Missourian staff. We had young, new staff members, but it was great working with them, said Cruzen. It was exciting to get ideas from them. I felt there was more pressure upon me because I was looked upon to be a leader, said Dave Gieseke, sports editor and one of the few staff veterans. But as the year pro- gressed, the newcomers improved. Because they did, the publication got better. Even with a young staff, the Missourian was able to broaden its scope on the campus environ- ment. I think we covered things fairly well, said Cruzen. It ' s hard to be perfect but based on our many letters to the editor, we reached a lot of people. ABOVE: Suzanne Cruzen, editor, discusses a story assignment with Lori Atkins, news editor, and Liz Scott. Cruzen assigned all the stories for the Missourian RICHT: First-year staffers Ben 20 NORTHWEST MISSOURIAN Holder and Doug Ceer are assisted by Missourian adviser Mike Sherer during paste-up. Every Wednesday night, the staff pasted up the paper. mi k