Students granted broadcast scholarships

Arizona Republic

Editor's note: This article was submitted by Hopi High journalism teacher Stan Bindell. Send your education news to lori.baker@arizonarepublic.com.

Two radio students at Hopi High School have been awarded scholarships to attend a prestigious national radio conference where they will learn about the First Amendment.

Povi Lomayaoma and Paul Quamahongnewa have been awarded scholarships to attend the National Federation of Community Broadcasters (NFCB) Youth in Radio Journalism Project in Atlanta next week.

 

The project is held with the 33rd annual NFCB conference. Students from Hopi High School are among nine schools selected to attend, the only high school from Arizona and the only students from a reservation high school.

NFCB, with the Georgia First Amendment Foundation and the Radio and Television News Directors Foundation, will train the radio students in radio journalism and the First Amendment. The project is funded by the McCormick Tribune Foundation.

The students will also learn how to select, research, report and write a story. They will also learn the importance of meeting deadlines under pressure. The project seeks to train students so they can practice journalism in their communities and create work to revitalize the practice and protection of the First Amendment.

After a training period, the student journalists will decide what story to cover and how to cover it. The story will be on a topic that can be covered using sources in Atlanta. By the end of the seminar, each team will have produced a story.

The students will be required to produce an additional news story or feature before the end of the school year. The stories will be made available to the entire public radio system through Public Radio Exchange, or PRX.

Quamahongnewa, a junior, and Lomayaoma, a senior, said they are looking forward to working with other radio students from throughout the country.

Quamahongnewa, who wants to be a sports journalist, said radio is important to him because it is his way of knowing what's going on in the world and listening to music when he's not listening to music on his iPod.

Lomayaoma plans to major in print journalism in college but wants to use radio as a second career.

"I like to write, and I just thought that journalism would be my career. I want to work on a big teen magazine," she said.

The Hopi High School radio class has the only live remote Native American radio teen talk show in the nation. It is on 2 to 2:30 p.m. each Thursday on KUYI, the Hopi community radio station.

Stan Bindell teaches radio and journalism at Hopi High School.