recent developments

‘News Wall’ tells passers-by what College is all about

by William McKeen

We get the weirdest telephone calls in the journalism department:

“Hi, do you know the number of the Westgate Publix?”

“Not off the top of my head. This is the journalism department office. Did you mean to call the operator?”

“No, I meant to call journalism. You guys are supposed to know stuff, aren’t you?

I suppose I have to agree with the random caller. I always thought the College of Journalism and Communications should be an information center for campus. But when something really big happened – the verdict in the O.J. Simpson trial comes to mind – it seemed the College was missing in action. Some faculty members had radios and one or two had televisions in their offices (but no cable). The Internet brought information into our offices. But there was no place to share information and heck, isn’t sharing what mass communication is all about?

‘The times they are a-changin’.’”

In Fall 2001, the “news wall” in the College debuted and immediately went through a trial by fire.

The news wall covers the outside of Gannett Auditorium on the first floor of Weimer Hall. It’s an imposing structure, made of half-inch tempered glass (selected for security and safety) in an aluminum-framed, dark bronze “store front.” The glass is tinted black with film applied to the back.

David Carlson, assistant in journalism, was one of the major forces behind construction of the wall. “We were concerned about security because of the expensive equipment that would be inside, but we were told by an architect that a sledge hammer was unlikely to break the half-inch tempered glass,” he said.

The news wall wasn’t even fully operational when the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 put it into service. The 50-inch screen in the lobby was a gathering place for groups of students all day. At one point on that horrible morning, more than 100 students stood transfixed by the images on the big screen. Six other monitors surrounding the big screen offered additional information from a variety of sources.

It was a tragic way to see the wall’s success, but it showed that the College needed such a place to share information.

The news wall equipment includes:
A Pioneer PDP-V 501-X 50-inch plasma display that is high-definition TV capable (the largest available in the world at the time). It can display TV, HD-TV, video and computer signals.
Four 27-inch Sony WEGA TV monitors (two tuned to major cable news stations and two tuned to the college’s TV stations).
Four 17-inch LCD computer monitors rotating through news Web sites around the world.
A 12-foot “moving sign,” a ticker displaying headlines received across the Internet from Yahoo!, AP, New York Times, and other sources.
Two Dell 1 Ghz Pentium III computers – one to power the ticker and one to power the four LCD monitors.
A JVC S-VHS VCR.
An RCA model DTC100 HDTV receiver/decoder.

“The idea here was to enable our students and faculty to watch news move around the world as events unfold,” Carlson said.

The LCD monitors are all powered by a single computer with a special video card enabling it to have four monitors attached. The College’s Interactive Media Lab, supervised by Carlson, developed software that continuously rotates through about 200 major news Web sites around the world. One monitor displays major U.S. news Web sites (newspapers and TV); one does major international news sites; one does Florida news organizations and the fourth does major college and university newspapers. Each screen updates every 30 seconds.

Carlson was not alone in developing the wall. Arlindo Albuquerque, director of the Office of Instructional Technology Services, was involved, as was Dr. John Wright, executive associate dean.

Carlson visited news organizations around the country, to see how they shared information. His travels included stops at MSNBC’s Web newsroom on the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Wash. The Arizona Republic had a ticker in its lobby with AP headlines scrolling across it.

“I suppose another inspiration was a walk through Times Square in New York City where there are elaborate news tickers on many of the buildings,” Carlson said.

“The idea behind The News Wall was to make it so that nobody would walk through Weimer Hall without knowing what we’re about in this building,” Carlson said.

So now, officially, we know stuff. By the way, the number for the Westgate Publix is (352) 376-1217.