Denver – This Thursday, March 10, the fifth annual Rocky Mountain PBS NewsMakers Luncheon and Be More Award ceremony was held at the Brown Palace Hotel in downtown Denver.
The NewsMakers Luncheon started five years ago as a celebration of Rocky Mountain PBS 50th anniversary celebration. Now the event is held annually by Rocky Mountain PBS as a fundraiser. Susan Barber, the Special Events Coordinator and a volunteer at Rocky Mountain PBS said that there are very generous donors that sponsor tables and local high school’s are invited to bring a professor and two students to the event. “All Denver Public Schools with an 11th and 12th grade program are invited.” This year the title sponsor was Colorado State University (CSU), and the two premier sponsors were Wells Fargo and TIAA CREF.
The luncheon is also a way to recognize staff members and significant community members. Susan Barber, the Special Events Coordinator and Volunteer at Rocky Mountain PBS said, “There are a lot of underwriters that don’t get recognized on-air, and this is a way we want to honor them.”
The event also included the fourth annual Be More Award. “This is really the heart and soul of the luncheon,” Barber said. The award started as a campaign with PBS national, and four years ago, it was decided that the Be More Award would be given to an extraordinary community member in Colorado who really exemplified a person who was given time and energy to the community.
According to Cynthia Hessin, the Executive Producer at Rocky Mountain PBS the award was made to honor someone who will be more for their community. “We look at nominees in all kinds of fields; education, business, the arts.”
This year the process of nominating community members was more in-depth. “Susan Barber sent out a call for entries, and then candidates could be nominated but had to fill out a questionnaire,” Hessin said. “We wanted the selection committee to get a sense of who these people really were.”
Three finalists were selected out of all of the nominations and were invited to attend the luncheon. After the three course waited meal provided by the Brown Palace Hotel, the finalists were presented and a brief biography was shown about what each one of them had done in their respective communities. Susan Birch, an executive director of the Colorado Department of Health Care Policy and Financing, was a finalist alongside Gailmarie Kimmel the founder and co-director of Be Local Northern Colorado, and George Sparks the president and CEO of Denver Museum of Nature and Science.
Last year’s Be More Award recipient Dr. Kristin Waters was the special guest who had the privilege of announcing this year’s award winner.
“This award honors local leaders who are newsmakers in their own right,” said Tom Milligan, the Vice President of External Relations at CSU as he introduced Waters to the stage. “Kristin is an inspiration to all of us, and we can use a little inspiration in education right now,” Milligan said.
Dr. Waters saluted all three of this year’s finalists and then said that the recipient of the award this year was, “an inspiration to all of us.” Waters went on to congratulate Susan Birch on her exemplary work in health care in Colorado and with the women and children of Kampala, Uganda.
After thanking her friends and family Birch said that she hopes that a spirit of love compassion and caring would grow in Colorado. Birch as influential in the initiation of a program called the Aging Well program, which offers elderly members of the community health screenings. She has also sacrificed much of her time to travel to Kampala and work with the women and children there. She merely calls that her hobby. “Give of your time, give of your love, and give of yourself,” Birch said. The selection committee agreed that Birch was the best example of a woman who became more for her community and truly gave of herself. “Give more, be more, and keep doing what you are doing,” she said.
Another part of the NewsMakers Luncheon was keynote speaker Hari Sreenivasan who works for the PBS NewsHour as an on-air and online correspondent. According to the Roper Poll, PBS is the most trusted and unbiased source for news. “We give you the information and let you make your own decisions,” Sreenivasan said. Sreenivasan came from a background working with commercial news teams such as the CBS Evening News, The Early Show and even as an anchor and correspondent for ABC News. He now works with NewsHour as the Director of Digital Partnerships.
“About 70 to 80 percent of what I do is online,” he said. “Only 20 percent of what I do is for on-air.” Sreenivasan has found ways of utilizing new technology to produce inexpensive news casts, many of which are online. “We’ve used technology to cast a wider net and distribute the news farther and wider than ever,” Sreenivasan said.
News distribution is changing, “News is not a destination as much as it was,” he said. “Now news stories are finding you,” Sreenivasan said as he spoke about Facebook feeds and other social networks.
“Switch your thoughts of TV as a medium to TV as an appliance,” he said. “It’s just a bigger screen, and there is not that much that people want to see live.” Sreenivasan said that more and more people are getting their news from iPads and iPhones or feeds rather than going directly to the source.
Sreenivasan uses the online world to make news more interactive. Using Google Moderator, he allowed the NewsHour website to allow for questions to be submitted and suggestions to be offered by audience members.
Doug Price, the president and CEO of Rocky Mountain PBS said that it is the interactivity of NewsHour that is a public servie that allows more people more access to in-depth information. Due to recent public broadcasting funding he was asked what would be lost. “My ability to get that signal out all over the state gets lost,” Price said. “This program has been sending out air signals for 50 years to all over this state.”
“Commercial television does not do what we do,” Price said. Price said that without the sponsorship from viewers, public service tools like the Google Moderator submissions wouldn’t be possible.
After the luncheon Sreenivasan came to a press conference for all of the high school and colligiate students that were present.
Lauren Bell, Kyle Cooper, Liz Dearstyne, Sarah Fast, Patience Kanda, Sam Kilman, Charlie Martinez, Katie Shultz, and Catie Wezensky are all mass communication students from Mesa State College that were able to attend the Rocky Mountain PBS NewsMakers Luncheon.
cmartine@mesastate.edu
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