by Helen Clarke
At 9 a.m. on March 25, 2004, Jason Hausler had finished classes for the day and decided to go to the office of WRFW, the UW-River Falls campus radio station. Shortly after, he heard news that devastated the campus community: Chancellor Ann Lydecker had died.
Hausler, who was the WRFW program director at the time, went on air with a brief report about Lydecker’s death. After that announcement, he was joined by Bryan Harmelink, music director; Jessica Wolf, news director; and Amanda Granger, who helped out in the news department. The four students decided to spend the day preparing a documentary biography in Lydecker’s honor for the five o’clock news.
They split duties, leaving Hausler to make several phone calls while Harmelink, Wolf and Granger spoke to people on campus.
“I spent the whole day gathering information about her life,” said Hausler, now the promotions director at WRFW. “I contacted people from her old schools and ended up with a lot of sources and quotes.”
“On a whim,” Hausler said the group created a five-minute mini-documentary recalling Lydecker’s life story.
“We did it not only to commemorate her, but so people would know why she meant so much to the University,” Hausler said.
He described the final product as “rough,” because it was recorded only once and left in its original form. Hausler said that taking a piece from conception to completion in one day meant that it wouldn’t have the technological quality of the average story.
But that didn’t discourage Sandy Ellis, journalism professor and overseer for the WRFW news department, from deciding to send the piece to the Wisconsin Broadcasters Association's Student Awards for Excellence's competition.
As an entry in the Long Form Program category, the piece titled, “Death Of The Chancellor” beat 73 entries to receive the 2005 first place honor.
“We didn’t expect to get first place,” Hausler said. “And we beat out Madison – they have a lot more resources than we.”
Hausler and Harmelink were in attendance at the April 9, 2005 ceremony but Wolf and Granger had graduated the previous spring.
“Bryan and I felt like we became real journalists,” Hausler said. “The judges were working journalists themselves, so it was a pretty big honor for them to recognize our talent.”