Despite being hidden in the back of a little-used building in the School of Communications, UMTV has consistently produced excellence with nine award-winning shows in the past few years.
One of their most acclaimed shows, Sports Desk, just finished airing their third show of the year.
Rory Lincoln, a 21-year-old senior, has been the executive producer of Sports Desk since spring of 2007 and hopes to produce news or sports after graduating from UM.
“Working for a show like this is almost more valuable than class because it gives you real life experience on the type of things you will need to do once you graduate and move on into the real world,” Lincoln said.
Sports Desk is a 30-minute show that airs every Friday night and covers UM sports. The show focuses on sports that are in season and each week they have a student-athlete come on air for an interview.
Meron Berkson is a senior and one of the anchors of Sports Desk. He has been involved with UMTV for two and a half years since he transferred from Hofstra University.
“It is lots of fun; you get to be creative, use humor and it is also a great learning experience,” Berkson said. “I want to do sports broadcasting so it is definitely great to get experience on camera.”
Sports Desk won the award for Best College Sports Show in the country given out by NBS (National Broadcast Society) last March.
“NBS searches all the universities and colleges throughout the country and the finals came down to us and two other schools, then we were able to run away with it,” Lincoln said.
UMTV is completely run by students who do their own reporting, camera work, video editing, script writing and production.
“The majority of students are broadcast journalism majors but numbers have begun to even out with other students who just want to be involved,” said Justin Leiser, the station manager for UMTV. “We have nine shows that students run and produce, and we also work on outside projects as well. But Sports Desk is definitely one of the shows we are most proud of.”
You can watch Sports Desk every Friday at 8:30 p.m. on channel 96 in the dorms and Coral Gables area, on umtv.miami.edu and you can see clips of the show on Facebook.