News

The Move to One Student Media Board

During the upcoming academic year,  representatives from the BCA and the Board of Publications (BOP), their programs, and their advisors will be meeting to give shape to a new entity — a single student media board.  This media board will oversee  KTUH and UHProductions as well as BOP’s  Ka Leo, the campus newspaper, and Hawaii Review, the campus literary magazine, and Ka Leo advertising.

At a BOP strategic planning meeting in January 2012, BOP members and guests from BCA and UHProductions, committed to moving forward to bring student-funded media programs under one board.

What followed this decision was the creation of a Working Group to research the best practices, nationwide, of single media boards and find out from these boards what worked well and what didn’t.  From this information, the committee developed a list of pros and cons and then formulated recommendations about the feasibility and desirability of having one  board for UHM’s student-funded media programs.

The Working Group consulted internally by presenting recommendations to the BCA and BOP boards and then held an open public forum to share recommendations and gather feedback, particularly from the programs that would be impacted.   The programs’ main concerns were maintaining autonomy of the programs, especially in regard to programming decisions;  keeping separate  the revenue streams for each program; and ensuring the the new board would be fully informed about and supportive of the programs.

At their  final board meetings in Spring 2012, the BOP and the BCA approved the move toward the one media board.

Pictures from  BCA at the CSO Installation on August 29th

Alicia giving her Keynote Speech

Attending BCA members pleging to work hard this year

Alicia and Mandy Westfall-Senda, previous BCA advisor now currently SAPFB advisor, after Alicia’s speech

Enjoying the Chocolate treat after the ceremony

Julia explaining she is excited to be apart of the BCA this year

Figure 2

CREATING A STRUCTURE OF GOVERNANCE for STUDENT MEDIA:

A CONCEPTUAL APPROACH – as of 10/04/2012-v2

Proposed Restructuring

Underlying Assumptions:  This proposed restructuring is predicated on the following underlying assumptions:

• The philosophical backbone remains the same —– superior and responsive media service to students and the campus community in exchange for the payment of mandatory student activity fees.
• Today’s student leaders have multiple, competing life demands that affect their availability and time to serve as effective policy governance overseers for complex operations that either broadcast daily or print more than once a week.
• All currently involved “voices” need to be incorporated in any reorganized governance structure.
• Any reorganized governance structure should be budget neutral, involving minimal to no new costs, especially at the expense of one program over another.

Conceptual Parameters:  Given the above underlying assumptions, this proposed restructuring will involve the following parameters:

• The print media programs and the broadcast media programs are separate, distinct programs of the department of Student Life & Development.  These programs and the staff members situated therein will share governance by one media board.
•  The policy governance functions for all student media supported by the mandatory student activity fees will be overseen by one governing board, the Student Media Board (SMB).
• The programming functions will continue to be performed by each different student media program, whether print or broadcast.
• The faculty coordinator of student publications will need to be retitled to faculty coordinator of student media.  This faculty coordinator will provide lead organizational advising for SMB.  Other faculty and APT staff will assist the faculty coordinator in providing organizational advising for the media programs, committees of the SMB, etc.

Attached is a chart depicting the proposed governance structure that provides the least amount of departure from current practice.

Transitional Steps:  In order to effect this governance structure, the steps outlined in Objective 4.0 are required to be taken with adjustments made to the initial timeframes laid out.  This objective is part of the Action Plan developed as a result of the BOP Strategic Planning Session held January 21, 2012 and concurred to by the Working Group on February 12, 2012.

Figure 3 Flow Chart