Oklahoma Creativity Festival begins with variety

Despite the rain, the Indian Student Association members continue their performance. PHOTO: Miranda Sanchez

The Oklahoma Creativity Festival kicked off Thursday morning with a flash mob that set the stage for a diverse festival to come.

Out of the three quick dance routines taking place in a 10-minute timespan, the final dance stood out from the others. While the first two were set to American Top 40 songs, the third performance was set to the Indian song “Mourya Re, Mourya Re” from the Bollywood film “Don.”

Mechanical engineering graduate student Gnana Subramaniam and his two fellow members from the Indian Student Association performed the last dance to share the culture of India and to celebrate the 50 anniversary of ISA.

“[Our dance] symbolizes the Ganpati Festival, which is actually taking place in India right now,” Subramaniam said. “At the end of the procession [in the festival], people are dancing and singing and that’s what we did today.”

This is the first year the Campus Activities Council is hosting OCF, and aimed to showcase a variety of performances.

According to the OCF website, the idea for the festival came from submitted student ideas. CAC expanded the student ideas for a campus arts festival into a “statewide creativity extravaganza.”

By including other organizations, which added diversity to their flash mob performance, OCF grabbed the attention of students.

“Afterwards I went and checked out [the OCF] website to see what other activities they had going on,” Kelly Powers, a communications sophomore said. “The flash mob had such a different set of dances, it made me wonder what else they had to offer.”

The OCF concludes on Saturday, September 29 with the “OFC Rave: Glow Out With A Bang” in the Jim Thorpe Multicultural Center at 9 p.m..

Curley advises Gaylord students on success

Rob Curley emphasizes the importance of acknowledging the need's of one's audience.
PHOTO: Miranda Sanchez

Students of Gaylord College were lectured last Monday by a guest speaker on the importance of utilizing online content and serving an audience.

The presentation given by Rob Curley, deputy editor of local news at the Orange County Register, is one of many events planned to by Student Media to study campus media. The lecture explained how to keep its audience interested, a problem for some university papers.

Uninterested students have led to less advertising in papers like The Daily Illini, NPR reports. A handful of students told NPR they had no interest in reading the paper, and even if they did pick it up, it was just to do the crosswords.

When Curley worked at the Las Vegas Sun, he implemented techniques that were discussed during the lecture to prevent the Sun from losing readership. Instead of just preventing a loss, he managed to increase readership eight fold.

“We do (multimedia) really well, but we figured out how to use that to grow our audience,” Curley said. The Las Vegas Sun sent its videos to the local news channel to publicize the media it produces.

Despite the quality of the multimedia the Sun produced, Curley said their success came from paying attention to their audience’s interests and finding stories based off that.  

Kate McPherson, a journalism junior, agrees with Curley’s emphasis on audience.  

“The stories that journalists thought were good stories weren’t things that their audience were interested in, so they weren’t serving their audience,” McPherson said. “That got me thinking about how do you define a community and am really serving the community that I’m supposed to be?”

According to The Daily, the next Student Media event is a discussion on Sept. 23 at 3 p.m. in the Governors Room in the Oklahoma Memorial Union. 

The Best Homework Ever

Out of the two college journalism classes I've taken, I've never had the opportunity to learn about photography. For my second assignment in JMC 3003, all I did was photography. Definitely the best homework I've been assigned.

Copeland Hall, home to OU Student Media. PHOTO: Miranda Sanchez

 

A vintage Pikachu taking a shot at Minecraft for the Xbox 360. PHOTO: Miranda Sanchez