Two students won first-place awards from College Broadcasters, Inc., for their work at Radio Free Hillsdale Sept. 2.
With her show State Facts, junior Jane O’Connor won first in the Best Regularly Scheduled Entertainment category, and Ben Dietderich ’20 won first place for his multi-part documentary Where All Trails End.
This is the first time Hillsdale students have taken first place in the annual competition sponsored by CBI, a national organization that represents students involved in radio and television broadcasting.
The radio program, which began in 2016, has submitted to CBI and a few other radio competitions each year, according to General Manager of WRFH Scot Bertram. In the past, Hillsdale students have become finalists.
Winning at CBI, Bertram said, is very prestigious because it is open to every college radio student in the country.
O’Connor’s show, State Facts, is a five-minute feature interview between O’Connor and a student from a U.S. state. O’Connor tests her guest’s knowledge of his home state and they banter back and forth, sharing facts and anecdotes about the state.
O’Connor said her interest in local and regional trivia came from her own lack of specific roots. Growing up, she moved around a lot, living in the U.S., Taiwan, and Japan. She said she didn’t really feel like she came from anywhere until her family settled in Maryland.
“I got kind of got obsessed with Maryland,” O’Connor said.
It all began when O’Connor discovered that Maryland’s state drink was milk. Then she learned its state sport was jousting. Her obsession took off from there.
“Now when I meet people, I’m really interested in where they’re from. I just get obsessed with the accents and the culture,” O’Connor said. “And when people are from there — anywhere — I’ll give them facts about the place. ‘Did you know this thing is from here? Did you know this food is from here? Did you know that they say this here?’”
She parlayed this obsession into State Facts. She asks people questions about their home state “because people love where they’re from.”
“They’re already experts before they come in,” O’Connor said. “They just want to talk about their state and why they love it and why it’s the best. They always think it’s the best one, which I love.”
O’Connor originally planned to record each state’s episode in the order in which the United States were founded, but she couldn’t find anyone from Delaware — “That’s really thrown a wrench in my plans from the beginning.” She had to ditch that historical lesson about America’s founding, and stick to state beverages.
Similarly, Dietderich’s radio documentary, Where All Trails End, attempts to capture a place that normal people love: Camp Parsons.
Dietderich grew up going to Camp Parsons, a Boy Scouts camp that has a surprising role in American History. Over the course of its 100 years of existence, it was the summer home to several governors, mayors, some of the first explorers of the Olympic Mountains, the designer of the Apollo 11 space suit, and, most notably Bill Gates.
“I wanted it to be something that would be enticing for anybody — not just someone interested in scouting, but anybody that has an appreciation for stories,” Dietderich said. “I try to talk about the significance that scouting has had on American history, American culture, and use camp Parsons more as an anecdote to that.”
Where All Trails End is a four-part series — three parts of which have already been released — of 30 minute long episodes featuring over two dozen interviews he recorded while working at Camp Parsons over the summer. From the hundreds of hours of raw audio, Dietderich spent at least thirty hours on each 30 minute episode. His third episode, themed “a week at camp,” was the one that won at CBI.
When he first took on the daunting project of a podcast documentary — one of the most competitive categories at CBI, according to Bertram — Dietderich said he was eager to lean into the medium of sound instead of video to tell his story.
“When people see things, they don’t pay attention as much to what they’re listening to,” Dietderich said. “But when it’s just a podcast, you pay attention more. You know if you hear somebody moving on through gravel, you hear every single footstep, and it tells you that something is happening. Maybe it goes from your left ear to your right ear to kind of indicate that cross in the room and so that part you kind of have fun with, because you realize that actually, there’s a lot you can do with sound effects.”
Over the interviewers, Dietderich used narration plus a combination of natural sound effects he captured from the camp and artificial sound effects from the studio to stitch the narrative together.
“You’ll hear the kids in their canoes, basically doing a canoe swamp or they’re running out each other in the water trying to swamp the canoes, you’ll hear kids splashing or jumping off the pier, you’ll hear people entering the dining hall and saying grace before the meal. Singing dining hall songs. You’ll hear the crackling of the fire,” Dietderich said. “There are some ambient moments that come from the experience and I wanted to bring those to life.”
Dietderich and O’Connor agreed that creating their episodes was rewarding in itself, even outside winning at CBI.
“What I love about it is creating content and really just entertaining people,” O’Connor said. “I had a lady reach out to me on Facebook like, ‘Hi, you don’t know me, but I have a 9-year-old and 11-year-old and they love your show State Facts.’ If I never won any radio award, I would still be happy. It’s just knowing that there’s a 9-year-old kid who likes to hear my show about the states. Wow.”
