Duck TV stopped being offered as a class during winter term for University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication students. During spring term, students and alumni took to social media with a petition and public statement about the state of Duck TV amid concerns of the program’s cancellation.

According to Duck TV Sports Producer and UO senior Sabrina Ortega, the producers tried to continue the program during winter term without SOJC facilities, but it meant more work for the students and a lower quality final product. Students, alumni and faculty are now looking for a way to preserve a broadcast journalism program that has been with the SOJC for almost 20 years.

Wait, what even is Duck TV?

Duck TV is a student-led news broadcast. The program covers news, sports, esports and produces creative projects. Each week the students record a studio session at Allen Hall and put the content together in a traditional broadcast format, according to Duck TV founder and retired faculty member Rebecca Force.

Force founded the program in 2002 while she was teaching a class that introduced students to broadcast news. She said Duck TV was an attempt to give students who were interested in broadcasting a place to get reps and practice their craft — much like the opportunity the Daily Emerald provides for writers.

Force didn’t do it alone. “If you guys want to do a show, I’ll find a place for it to be published,” she remembers telling her students for years. Two students took Force up on her offer. They spent a summer recruiting people for the program, and it started off with about 15 members, Force said.

The program has been student-run since the beginning. Force said the students’ original set of rules was still in the program syllabus when she retired in 2018.

Since its foundation, Duck TV has grown from a program of 15 students covering news and sports to one that organizes between 150 to 200 students to cover sports, report news, produce short films, run PR and explore other creative opportunities.

“It’s the most freedom I think anyone will ever have in broadcasting,” Force said of Duck TV. “I’ve never seen such creative people.”

The program survived because of the passion students had for it, Force said. She said alumni often stay involved. Student producers who left the program would mentor their replacements, allowing for skills and information to pass from one generation to the next.

Duck TV offers a wide variety of experiences to students that participate. The famous song and YouTube video “I Love my Ducks” was a Duck TV production. Before the pandemic, the sports crew was able to cover the Pac-12 basketball tournaments. Last spring, two students, Ortega and Executive Producer Israel LaRue, covered March Madness.

“It was interesting covering the tournament because we were making the calls,” Ortega said. “I was getting paid in experience and joy and excitement and all that jazz.”

What has happened since COVID-19?
Duck TV changed significantly when COVID-19 started. Normally reporters would spend a week making pitches and then interviewing, filming and editing their segment. Instead, reporters wrote articles during spring term 2020, LaRue said. News reporters wrote about frontline workers and sports reporters interviewed athletes and coaches about the impact of COVID-19 on the athletic programs.
The program operated over Zoom in fall term 2020 and covered the sports games that still happened. “Since journalism is so hands-on, it’s hard to do it over Zoom,” staff reporter and UO junior Jennifer Singh said. “It definitely made it a lot harder, but we were still able to make do.”
LaRue said Duck TV was mostly back to its normal programming by winter 2021.“We were still meeting on Zoom,” he said, “but we could actually do studio.”

Duck TV continued like this through the spring term of 2021.

What happened this year?

Since the return to in-person classes, the SOJC began an “audit” of its programs, Associate Dean of the SOJC Deb Morrison said. “Any good organization does an audit,” Morrison said. “One hundred and fifty students, one credit, is not sustainable. It doesn’t give the type of experiences that it once did.”

The SOJC stopped offering studio space to Duck TV students and stopped offering the class starting winter term. The students knew from the beginning of the 2021-22 academic year that Duck TV would undergo changes, but they had no idea what kind, Ortega said. This led some students and alumni to believe the winter term changes might signify the end of the program.

The SOJC never planned on canceling Duck TV, Morrison said. “We know we want to make Duck TV a crucial part of the curriculum,” she said.

Morrison said the SOJC didn’t want to charge students for a class that wasn’t complete.

In the winter, despite not having access to the SOJC studio, the student producers tried to put on an independent studio session. “It was a mess,” Ortega said. “It just didn’t look good. People that had been in Duck TV prior could recognize right away that it wasn’t gonna look like it did before.”

COVID-19 has brought attention to issues of communication between SOJC faculty and Duck TV. “From my understanding, it has been the associate dean talking to the faculty advisor talking to us, us talking to the faculty advisor talking to the associate dean,” LaRue said.

“We were talking in pods instead of talking together,” Morrison said. “That wasn’t good communication.”

What’s going to happen next?

“Our main thing is, if the unfortunate event of not being able to work something out with the university and still being a class, we may have to go independent,” LaRue said. Making Duck TV independent would ensure the program continues to run year-round and that students continue to get the same opportunities as before.
LaRue is not the only Duck TV student who hopes the program can find a way to stay a part of the SOJC and continue year-round reporting. “Having a little more faculty involvement would only add to the experience,” sports reporter and UO senior Alexa Tagliaferri said.

As a result of their experiences trying to run Duck TV without SOJC facilities and knowing the history of the program, student producers see the prospect of going independent as a last resort.

“Going independent is not something we have been afraid of, but it is a lot more we have to do,” Ortega said. However, she said that going independent seems unlikely considering the deep connection Duck TV has had with the SOJC since its foundation.

“In the long run, if you’re coming out of a storm, which COVID has been, then it is probably wise to re-establish and start over, and like any good organization, nothing is ever static,” Force said. “There is such a possibility to go any direction.”

Morrison and LaRue said the SOJC is planning for a prototype of the Duck TV program in the fall. Morrison said the SOJC is currently looking at a 20-week class that runs through fall and winter terms, followed by a capstone project in the spring.