The Elder News Network has been Elder’s sports broadcasting program for many years now. The first broadcast ever for ENN was done by Dave Rapien and Kevin Welsh on November 1st, 2003, when Elder football was playing Anderson in the first round of the playoffs. Since then, ENN has only focused on sporting events, but in November of 2017, the students decided to make a change.
The morning announcements were born. However, throughout the years, ENN did not have a regular schedule of when they were doing the announcements. This changed when I arrived to Elder in 2023.
Mr. Rogers (a teacher and moderator for ENN) came up to me one day and asked if I could do a promotional ad for the morning announcements. ENN was finally making the Friday morning announcements a regular practice, and as a freshman I was able to be part of a new era.
The first month of morning announcements were rough. We had a limited staff with mostly freshmen, so there was a lack of experience in the studio. This led to many mistakes, but once guys became familiar with the structure the broadcasts heightened in quality.
For two years now, ENN has had the same structure for the morning announcements. The ENN intro, a video of the prayer and pledge of allegiance, the morning announcements written by Elder staff, a random video of a story a student made, sometimes a segment of general campus news, and the show would be finished off with sports. The entire show would run around seven minutes.
The show soon became predictable and bland. This year, ENN is looking to make changes, especially since some key seniors (Nick Liderbach and Parker Brewer) graduated the previous year. There are a new set of leaders and a new set of rules that must be followed.
ENN is limited to what they can show in the morning announcements, because every minute cuts into the class times of the first period of the day.
Adam Duwel (Elder media coordinator and ENN supervisor) mentioned that they are going to start the morning announcements before the school day. This portion will be filled with nonessential news, but it gives opportunities to present more packages and gives a variety to the announcements.
In the past, ENN could not make many packages because there were not enough kids willing to subtract from their busy schedules to create a video. However, Duwel teaches broadcasting and Mass Media classes now where his students will create different projects to make the idea of adding to the show a reality.
With these students making the packages for the show, ENN may run into the problem of quantity over quality. Duwel says, “The quality is a hard conversation for me just because for a lot of these guys, it’s the first time doing anything like this. I think we have a really high standard around here for how we create content and oftentimes we say, hey, that’s not the best, but it’s something that the student tried. No one’s getting paid for this. It’s all trial and error.”
Troy Parker, a rising leader in ENN, mentions that the quality of the packages and graphics may be limited for the first few weeks. However, there are a decent number of upperclassmen that are there to give assistance during the new students’ first time dealing with editing.
Along with the quality of graphics, the quality of the overall broadcast might be reduced for the first few. Parker says that the first broadcasts might be a little “bumpy”, but as Duwel’s students become more experienced, the announcements will begin to run smoothly.
These potential bumps in the road are also a cause of Brewer and Liderbach’s absence: “We will be missing them this year,” Duwel adds. “There might be some more growing pain, some adjustments for that first couple of weeks of the news, but we’ll get into a groove.”
There are some potential members of ENN that could fill these shoes, but it will be interesting to see what the broadcasts will look like without those senior leaders.
With a fresh start to the morning announcements, viewers should be excited to see what the Elder News Network has to offer. There are new faces replacing the old, and more opportunity to make the announcements better than in previous years. Tune in to see what the team of broadcasters will create this year.
