Students Hone Journalism, DJ Skills at Local High School Radio Station

Alana Osborne was a shy, quiet freshman at when she enrolled in a radio broadcasting class to try and come out of her shell and make friends.

“I locked myself in this room (the green room) at the station and practiced what I was going to say,” she said “Then I did a broadcast and during that semester I became bold and confident—I learned to talk to people and realized I wanted a career in broadcasting.”

In a unique arrangement, Osborne and other Mercer Island High students can learn the trade of broadcasting by working at their own on-the-air station, 

Alana took the weekly four hours of radio broadcasting class, from beginners to advanced, taught by Nathan Friend, a broadcast professional who splits his time between teaching at MIHS and working at one of the local NPR-affiliated stations, KUOW. Students in the advanced class are taught hands-on skills by programming the KMIH 88.9 FM station song play-list, creating public service announcements, operating the audio mixing board during a broadcast and serving as DJs on air at the five room station that was built into MIHS 42 years ago. The radio signal is broadcast locally from a 40-foot radio tower on top of the auditorium and transmitted throughout King County on 94.5 FM from a radio tower on Capitol Hill.

“We did a survey and found out that most of the students don’t listen to radio,” said Friend. “My students listen to iTunes and Pandora (music streamed on the internet), so the problem becomes how do you teach radio to kids who don’t listen to it? We’ve had to expand beyond teaching just radio skills to teaching communications; how to communicate efficiently, how to tell stories that are relevant to what is happening in the world.”

Radio broadcasters who have graduated from the program now serve on the five-person advisory board along with the KMIH Booster Club that helps support the station with volunteers, engineering and programming.

Friend runs the station with four beginning and four advanced students and a host of volunteers, like Alana, who completed the courses but wanted to bring listeners to the station via a marketing program she established.

“Being the promotion director for the first time was a gamble, but it turned out great,” said Osborne. “I set up remote broadcasts at the, the event and a marathon in Bellevue, and that exposure was essential in getting parents to get their kids involved with the station.”

Osborne noted that many adults stopped by the Hot Jamz booth to say they had no idea that Mercer Island High School had a radio station.

“The kids that stopped by told me that all they want to hear is the music, that they’re sick of commercials, which made our station a natural, because we don’t have commercials as a non-profit (educational facility) … I told them we’re like KISS FM, but without the commercials.”

Hot Jamz used to have a hip-hop format, but moved to “Current Hits Radio” (CHR) programming when it became more popular.

A handful of public school districts in the state offer hands-on learning at a broadcast radio station — including  and KASB at Bellevue High School —  and Hot Jamz KMIH nearly disappeared altogether a few years ago. In 2004, a larger Oregon radio station moved to Covington and wanted the high school station’s position on the radio dial, then 104.5 FM. After a legal battle that involved then-Senator Maria Cantwell and the FCC, a new dial number was found for Hot Jamz at 88.9 and 94.5, while the company that owned the Oregon station paid MIHS’ moving expenses as well as all legal fees incurred during the four-year skirmish.

Hot Jamz is easy to spot inside the high school, with a huge mural of music celebrities painted on the front of the station. Inside are two audio editing rooms, a server room and green room for guests as well as a master control room where junior broadcasters learn to run a board, do voice tracks and announce various songs and public service announcements (PSAs).

The station tracks its listeners, like all other major radio stations in the Seattle market, by the use of PPM or Portable People Meters. Arbitron, the company that tracks the ratings and listeners for radio stations assigns small devices like pagers to randomly selected people that is able to detect what station is being listened to in the car, at work or at home. That data is used to determine audience size and in KMIH’s case, 40,000 people are listening at any given time.

Besides teaching the basics of radio journalism, Friend also gives his class projects to work on. This quarter, it’s an hour-long show for two teams to produce and air on Memorial Day.

“It’s real world, hands-on, project-based learning,” said Friend. “It’s teaching kids what they need to know to succeed, not just what they need to know to pass a test.”

And Friend notes that he’s working with the school administration to update the classes with multi-media additions, like website pod casts and streaming videos.

“I have a whole laundry list of things I want to do to create an integrated media program,” he said. “It’s a challenge to bring student interests and relevance together.”

Meanwhile, Alana Osborne will graduate a year early, due to the “Running Start” program that has allowed her to take classes in her junior year from Bellevue Community College.

“The critical thinking and technical skills I’ve learned here are essential to my entering into the Walter Cronkite School for broadcast journalism at Arizona State University,” Osborne said. “The program is giving you a vision of what it’s really like to be a broadcaster, how to effectively engage the audience over the air … it’s a window into the real work world.”