Bellmore-Merrick Broadcasting goes abroad, participates in Student Television Network’s National Convention

At nearly 4 p.m. on March 18, Wellington C. Mepham High School seniors Lily Yepez and Hannah Broxmeyer emerged from the edit room at the 2023 Student Television Network’s National Convention to the cheers and applause of on their Bellmore-Merrick Broadcasting teammates and smashed the “uploaded” button on the team’s final contest submission of the weekend. 

It was a journey of over 2,800 miles and four years in the making. Student Television Network is a nationwide organization of more than 600 schools that exists to support and encourage scholastic broadcasting. 

“It was back in March of 2020 that BMB’s first trip to the STN convention in Washington, D.C. was the first event canceled because of the then just breaking pandemic,” explained program director Stu Stein. “Since then BMB students have participated in the event virtually but this was their first time actually making it to a convention in person.”

BMB’s students competed in seven onsite competitions including Crazy 8’s where the entire group working as a team had eight hours to produce an eight-minute “Morning Show.”

Teams of BMB students immediately set to work dissecting the prompt and searching for stories to report. 

The “hub team” headed off to the iconic Long Beach Lighthouse to stakeout and set up a backdrop for the BMB anchors, sports report and weather. 

The “What is That?” team got an education on the financial system at a local Long Beach bank to prepare a report on the recent Silicon Valley Bank collapse and the live reporting team set off on foot from the Convention Center for Cambodia Town on foot for a three-mile walk for a story on the upcoming Cambodia Town restaurant week that celebrates the contributions the largest population of Cambodians outside Cambodia in the world.  

Lisa Kalish, a BMB teacher and one of the trip leaders, discussed the educational value of the experiential learning that took place on the STN trip. 

“The challenges these kids are surmounting the memories that they are making and the lessons they are learning out here will stay with these students for their entire lives,” she said. “The skills they’re building will be the skills that carry them to success in high school, in college and beyond because these are not lessons to be learned, these are experiences that were made.” 

She continued that “for three straight days these kids willingly reported stories, wrote and rewrote scripts and built dozens of graphics and they didn’t receive a grade for any of it.”

All of BMB’s contest submission will be available to view on the next two episodes of BMB’s weekly news magazine, Midweek Update, which can be found on the BMB YouTube. 

The episodes will post on March 22 and Wednesday, March 29. While at the convention BMB learned that their two weekly broadcasts, the BMB Morning Announcements and its news magazine, Midweek Update, both earned bronze medals in the competition for STN’s prestigious Broadcast Excellence Award.

The next big event on BMB’s calendar is the annual Broadcast Awards for Senior High moving to Hofstra this year on May 15.

Sponsored by Hofstra’s Lawrence Herbert School of Communication, WABC 7 and Newsday, BASH celebrates the accomplishments of the growing Long Island High School Broadcast community. BMB will be co-hosting this year’s event along with the Manhasset Broadcasting Company from Manhasset High School.