By Tanya Ruscheinski (Contributor) – Email
Print Edition: November 2, 2011
CIVL Radio has officially begun including local news content on-air, following the hiring and training of intern Tiffany Suderman at the beginning of this semester. The project was made possible due to a $5,883 funding grant awarded to the station in May by the Community Radio Fund of Canada (CRFC), under the organization’s Youth Internship Program.
The eight-month program provided CIVL Radio with the funding required to train an intern in everything they needed know about developing and airing radio programming. Once they had grasped the basics, they were to be put in charge of their own programming slot under the watchful eye of Aaron Levy, CIVL’s station manager, until their internship expires on April 22, 2012.
Suderman, a second-year Arts student at UFV, applied for the internship in the summer of 2011 and is now currently an intern and community news editor for CIVL Radio. “She’s brand new,” Levy said, “which is really exciting.” Due to her recent hiring, Suderman had to learn everything from scratch within the two-week training period. “In the end she’s excelled way faster and better than I expected,” Levy said.
Once the training period ended mid-way through September, Suderman began developing her own programming and airing in her own time slot during regular CIVL programming. “It’s really fun,” Suderman said, “but it’s [also] really challenging. Some days are really exhausting but I really like it… and I haven’t stopped learning.”
The basis of Suderman’s programming focuses on local news, an area that Levy is very excited to be able to have on the station. According to him, providing the community with local news on a daily basis is “not only something that isn’t in the Valley but it is something that we couldn’t do without the Community Radio Fund.”
The significance of the internship for CIVL is that the station now has the ability to produce “substantial programming,” Levy explained. “We hope it will be seen as grassroots programming,” he said, “and that we’re talking about stories that otherwise won’t get discussed.”
According to Melissa Kaestner, Executive Director of the CRFC, that is precisely the reason CIVL was awarded the funding. “I think what the committee liked about CIVL’s application was that it was local news,” Kaestner said. “Because the programming [is] provided by people in the local community it’s very locally relevant.”
The CRFC Youth Internship Program gives out between 10 and 14 awards per year, which add up to about $80,000 in grants annually. As Kaestner pointed out, the goal of the funding is not just to train a new intern, but more importantly to start something that will flourish after the internship ends. “Our funding [eventually] runs out,” Kaestner said, “but the impact of the project lasts beyond.”
Once April rolls around and the internship ends, Levy said that Suderman’s involvement at CIVL will be entirely up to her. “We hope that she’ll stick around,” he said, “because she’s doing great work right now and she’s definitely a bright and really talented person.”
Even though she only has two months’ radio experience, Suderman is excited for the future. “I definitely want to do stuff with CIVL [after the internship ends],” she said. “I think it’s a great thing for our campus to have and it’s a really good thing to be involved in.”
Suderman’s program is called CIVL Community News Update and first airs at 11 a.m., usually at the top of the hour.
