ORONO – This fall, the University of Maine department of communication and journalism received its fourth digital video editing workstation.

According to department chairman John Sherblom, this piece of equipment has capabilities similar to those of equipment used at professional television stations.

But as valuable as it may be for students to learn their trade on the workstation, the equipment represents a small part of the transformation the department has engaged in for its broadcast journalism sequence in 1998.

Back then, the college radio station was struggling and a campus television station was a distant dream.

Now, UMaine students are piloting a radio station with a new tower and transmitter and plan to start running transmission tests for a student-run, closed-circuit educational cable channel by the end of the semester.

The proposed campus channel, tentatively called the Maine Channel, is a joint project of the department of communication and journalism and the department of information technologies.

Lyombe Eko, assistant professor in the department, has overseen the long-term development of the television channel. He said he hopes for a permanent launch of the station, Channel 42, in 2002.

Eko said the channel will provide a valuable service to the campus and the wider community.

“First of all, we hope to make it a campus channel, with student and faculty productions, from the School of the Performing Arts to class lectures and sports. … We also hope to eventually participate in public access educational broadcasting, to send a package of

regular programming to the regional cable system,” he said.

The station will build on the department’s tradition of public service. Eko said the department has worked in collaboration with local community organizations to produce documentaries that are of interest to the community.

He hopes the station will expose those documentaries to a wider audience.

Past documentaries have focused on historic houses of Bangor, the Peace and Justice Center discussions, a local violin maker, an author and organizations on the UMaine campus such as the Advanced Engineered Wood Composites Center, the School of Performing Arts, the Franco-American Centre and the Wabanaki Center.

In 1997 the department hired Eko and Michael McCauley as assistant professors. Eko has focused on developing the television channel, while McCauley has worked on improvements to the radio station along with Kim Mitchell from UMaine’s marketing department.

After a few short years, the student response has been overwhelming. Eko said there are now about 30 broadcast journalism students in the department.

Mass communications majors also have been able to use the new equipment. The department has had to limit class sizes to manage the influx of students.

Eko is able to accommodate 20 students per semester in his digital video class. Counting the fall, spring and summer sessions, a total of 60 students are able to use the equipment each year. He estimated that 20 more students use the equipment to do work for classes from advertising to broadcast writing classes.

“It’s definitely an attraction to the college. We used to lose students because we didn’t have any broadcast journalism,” Eko said.

The developments are making UMaine competitive with the nation’s other public universities.

“Most land-grant universities in the United States have their own TV stations. … [we’ll be] just like any other college our size,” Eko said.

That will mean amassing the necessary equipment, piece by piece.

Eko said the newest digital workstation cost about $10,000. But equipment prices, he added, are going down each year. He said the department needs about $15,000 per year for new equipment.

The department’s equipment arsenal includes four digital workstations, a video animation work station, a teleprompter, a video mixer, cameras, lighting equipment, software, an audio mixer and other news production equipment.

Digital video equipment purchases have been funded in part by the College of Liberal Arts, UMaine’s Bird and Bird Grant, The Center for Teaching Excellence, the department of communication and journalism, the associate vice president for research and the Academic Computing Advisory Committee.

But, Eko added, as the department acquires each new piece, it becomes harder to find a place to put it. “The main concern is space. We’re outgrowing our facilities,” he said.

Eko said he hopes to move the equipment for the television station to another site on campus, perhaps to the large, empty studio in Alumni Hall that was once part of Maine Public Television. That space likely would be shared with the department of information technologies.

Students and staff from the department of information technologies would provide technical support for the television station, performing tasks such as studio lighting, facilities and equipment networking, fiber-optic and satellite connections.

Like the television station project, the radio station WMEB project also is limited by resources and space. McCauley said the radio station learned, soon after his arrival on campus, that it would need to find a transmitter site and build a new tower.

“Now we have a first-rate college radio station. But WMEB has really been strapped, budgetwise, in terms of paying off the new tower. We will move the studios into the new union very soon, and hope we can get some new equipment in the process. Once that’s done, the station will be a showpiece,” McCauley said.

Students in his radio news and audio documentary classes use the WMEB studios for audio editing and actual broadcasting.

Eko and McCauley agreed that the investment is worth the effort. Eko said that students gain from the “real-world” experience they acquire working on state-of-the-art equipment and learning how to run their own stations.

McCauley added that many of the department’s broadcast journalism students have landed jobs in the media.

Both added that Rebecca Eilers, the dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, has provided encouragement and support for the endeavor.

“The support we’ve received shows there’s a lot of interest,” Eko said.