In the center of a hallway on the lower floor of a student administration building, various students stop, pull out their phones, and take quick selfies, all at the same spot – in front of a thoughtfully crafted wall featuring a large mirror encompassed by artwork and a bright sign reading “BGU Radio.”
On the other side of the hallway, intentionally reflected in the mirror, is the recording studio of BGU Radio, a student initiative started at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beersheba that now features four divisions – podcasting, live broadcast, educational outreach, and a new video division.
“I love it because I get to learn something literally every day because I’m here at the university working on projects that are actually interesting,” said Yael Goldfinger, who studied conflict management and communications and joined the radio about two years ago. “And I get to combine that with my creative side. I feel like I’m working magic when I do this.”
After graduating, Goldfinger was hired to work at the university spokesperson’s office and to manage social media accounts, but also chose to continue her work at the radio station. A main goal of BGU Radio, she said, is to “create some root for development, for our careers, and where we see ourselves in the future.”
Boaz Ukelson, head of new media at BGU Radio, said universities want students to have practical experiences and learn the skills of the profession, but it can be difficult to create such opportunities.
At BGU Radio, he explained, the opportunities happen just by the station being on campus and open to students.
Work produced by the station includes online media content for the marketing of the university or the radio, October 7 testimonials, and a broadcasting segment for Bedouin women.
Radio can be therapeutic, as well, Goldfinger said, explaining how, when carrying out the project recording October 7 testimonies, she offered people chances – which they took her up on – to just speak and listen to themselves talk, with no recording devices turned on.
At the station, each semester typically begins with about 50 people, and the year ends with about 80 to 100, not including guests or listeners.
Aspects of the radio include the freedom for students to express themselves and for the station to contribute to help the university achieve its goals, explained Buzi Raviv, the co-founder and director of BGU Radio.
“One of the goals is teaching,” he said, “so we offer innovative teaching, using the media tools that we have here, [whether] it’s podcasting, live radio broadcasting, or videos. Anything that will be in the future, we will adopt it and use it to achieve these goals.”
A COVID-era joint initiative by Raviv and a professor of philosophy resulted in alternative classes and exams via podcast.
For a Zen Buddhism class, the professor made a podcast in place of a lecture, the discussion of the class was about the episode, and the students received grades based on their responses and dialogue.
“This is just one course. We already contributed to 35 courses,” said Raviv, noting that the student response to the initiative was “amazing.”
“The lesson is not to be the most successful podcast in Israel, but to be accurate to the needs of that class that we offer the course for,” he added.
“So, in the case of the Zen Buddhism course, it was only 30 students who were attending this class, and the podcast was aimed at those 30 students, but we have already more than 400,000 listeners for that podcast.”
For the exams, alternative tasks were designed for the students.
“They come here to do their project and record it, and when they finish, they say that this was the deepest learning experience they had during their time at the university,” Raviv said. “And they say that this should happen in every course they take.”
In addition to learning at the station, the students teach. In the Outreach Division, trained broadcasters go to nearby elementary and high schools to meet pupils and teach them to produce radio shows or transform their research projects into a podcast.
“This interaction, it’s like youth movement interactions, but around the radio and media, and it’s really meaningful because we meet diverse populations,” Raviv said. “We touch the Bedouin society, we touch the religious society and the secular society, we meet them, they come here to visit, they meet each other.
“I think this is something really great that we do here to develop the Negev – it’s one of the university’s goals to develop the Negev, [and] we are making our contribution to develop the culture in the Negev.”
Students bringing unique, different, and unconventional ideas have a place at the radio, Goldfinger explained.
“This is actually a place for you to be different, to create something that’s truly yours, that has your stamp, your name, on it in the most accurate way,” she said. “And the things that we do might be a little bit quieter, but they nail it, and in ways that you wouldn’t necessarily expect.
“We also get to leave this place and say, ‘I did it. I did something that’s professional, and I have edited films for national TV before I even graduated,’” Goldfinger added. “I wouldn’t have been able to do this if I didn’t have this atmosphere to support me throughout this process.”
"BGU Radio station recently joined the entrepreneurship center of the University, 'Yazamut 360', and currently, we are working on a strategic plan to scale it," Raviv said.
Studying media at Bar-Ilan University
Sivan Raviv, a journalist and TV anchor who has been teaching at Bar-Ilan University for about 10 years, told The Jerusalem Post it’s important for students to not just focus on theories but to acquire skills and experience.
Within the School of Communication, she teaches students to produce a video story from start to finish, including how to film, edit, script, narrate, and produce news video content.
“Additionally, I believe one of the strongest values I can teach students today is the ethics in journalism, which can sometimes be lost, especially with the growing influences of social media,” Raviv wrote in an email.
“I teach classes on ethical dilemmas for journalists, and students need to analyze scenarios and try to understand how to handle a certain ethical situation. It is very thought provoking.”
Many groups of students have chosen to cover video stories related to the war, Raviv said, such as the challenges IDF soldiers faced returning to university life after months of service and the disconnect between the two worlds; businesses in the North that lost clients because of the war; and the operations of a breast milk bank since October 7.
“There is no shortage of stories. It may take us decades to tell them all, if ever that was possible,” Raviv wrote. “And students are generally eager to go explore, one story at a time.”
Telling a full and objective story among many narratives is becoming more challenging, Raviv wrote.
“We in Israel tell our stories in the media, and we are certain that our story is the only one, the true one,” she explained. “But the other side is telling a completely different story and narrative, one we are less exposed to in the news here, and it is almost impossible to intertwine the two narratives. It’s like two parallel worlds we live in.”
Clila Magen, a lecturer at Bar-Ilan, teaches courses covering topics such as media in Israel, branding for nations and places, and strategic communications, and also leads a media internship program for students.
The program – which works out to be 100-120 hours and which students receive academic points for – integrates students into various public and private sectors such as nongovernmental organizations, nonprofits, and political offices.
“This broader program is about creating these connections, networking for these students, so when they finish their first degree, they’ll have a better start in the labor market,” Magen said.
In the past decade, Magen noted, students have had an increasing interest in studying strategic communications.
“I’ve been teaching media for 20 years now, and I can see that in the late 1990s, students who came to study communications were more interested in TV, radio, wanted to be reporters – that was the main aspiration students would come to study media for,” she said.
“Today, I feel it’s really changing because media has turned [out] to be so much more than that. Some students still want to be these reporters on media, print, radio, TV, but many others want to be creators of content, digital marketing.”
Hands-on journalism experience at Sapir College
On a college campus about 3 km. from the Gaza border, where yellow hostage flags, ribbons and memorials have a strong presence and the war is within eyesight, students are the ones operating two local publications – the news website Spirala and the radio station Kol HaNegev (Voice of the Negev) 106.4 FM.
“I think there isn’t a program that we do that doesn’t either talk about the hostages or look at a personal point of view of whatever topic it could be,” said Chaim Smierc, a third-year student studying communications at Sapir College in Sderot, and he highlighted recent stories the station covered about tattoos, including those inked since October 7.
“There’s always a point of view that we see where we want to talk about what happened to us and what we continue to experience here, because it’s definitely still very, very deep inside of us,” he added. “I think we still are trying to find a creative way to sort of express how we feel about everything that went on.”
Yuval Gozansky, the chairman of the communications department at Sapir College, said that in the first year, all students learn general studies and then split into tracks for the following three years. The department has three tracks — Journalism in the Digital Age, Radio and Digital Broadcast, and Marketing Communication and Digital Media.
Each year, about 80 students join the School of Communication, Gozansky said.
“Thirty-three percent of their [total] learning is done through professional learning, like broadcasting, music editing, journalism marketing,” Gozansky said. “So we’re trying to be very much hands-on [in] everything they do. So they jump from academic classes to practical classes in the same day.”Many people the students approach are open to communicating, Smierc said.
“Especially after everything that happened during this war – especially on this campus and the area in general – people have a much bigger pride in the fact that we have this local radio station that’s run by these students that are living here,” he said.
“There’s always people that would love to share their stories, especially because, as students, it’s not like we’re driven by ratings,” added Smierc, noting that in addition to news, the station covers culture, sports, and music festivals.
“So we can always discover all sorts of stories that maybe no one ever thought of covering, because it’s just stuff that interests us.”
Hanna Aminov, a third-year student in the journalism track, has worked on various stories for Spirala, including one a few months after October 7 about her friend who lives on the Kfar Aza kibbutz and the friend’s family.
“I think the most important thing – and the big thing – is that we live in Israel, in the Gaza border communities, and so we have a lot of different cultures and a lot of different people from different religions,” she said.
“We always have new things to talk about,” Aminov added, “because there’s so many different people from different regions, and we need to take notice of every one of them and see the different opinions of everyone.”
Each day, Aminov explained, the students sit together and present items that are newsworthy, and their teacher discusses the topic and why it would or wouldn’t work. Then, students write, edit, and take photographs.
“We are very practical,” Aminov said. “We go out, we see things, we look around, we interview a lot of important people, we go to conventions of the journalism industry in Israel, and we touch the specifics. I think the best thing here is that we get the tools that help us to be the best journalists in the best way possible from the best people.”
At the college, Gozansky teaches a course on children’s media, and for the curriculum, students work on two articles and then go to schools around the campus where they teach fifth graders to write for a newspaper.
“I think, when you teach, you learn a lot, you have to explain,” he said. “And the kids love them [the students], and they love the kids.”
“I think curiosity is something very hard to learn; it’s very hard to teach,” Gozansky added.
“You have to inspire people to be curious. And I think what our department specializes in is giving a tool kit, so [the student] knows how to broadcast, but he also knows how to operate the machines, the computers, the editing programs, so they can be a one-man show. [They know about] every aspect of broadcasting, in newspaper, in radio, also in journalism.”
Kol HaNegev operates from 8 a.m. to around 10 p.m. or midnight, including some prerecorded shows broadcasted in the night, said station manager Ido Ariel, who has been working at the station for 25 years.
The objective of the radio station is for students to learn by doing, Ariel explained, such as creating podcasts, recording items, and broadcasting on the live stream, “just doing it day by day, week by week, and trying to be better and better. It won’t be enough if you do it once a month.
“In the beginning they stutter and look for the words. That’s the reason that in the beginning I just tell them, ‘Do your thing, open the mic and say whatever you want, and try to enjoy it in the beginning,’” Ariel added.
“It’s hard to cope with this live broadcast. Then they understand that they can say whatever they want, and the power of things that they’re saying, and dealing with the power and the responsibility.”
In 2023, the students at Sapir College partnered with students at Connect Institute & MAHIR Centre in Morocco, and jointly produced media content including English-language podcasts covering topics relevant to both countries.
Together, the young Israelis and Moroccans discussed subjects such as leaving the family home to pursue personal independence and the weight and impact of family culture on emerging adulthood.
“I would love to have international cooperations,” Gozansky said. “We can think about broadcasting together online with a college in a different country, we can join articles together, we can exchange articles. I think – from what we’ve learned from the Moroccan experience – that meeting people from another country also helps you to open your mind, broaden your horizons, and see the issue of perspective.”
In an age of fake news and social networks, it’s important to learn communications, Gozansky said.
“We’re a small broadcasting journal, but we hope our influences could be seen in years, because when we teach students and they go out to the world, this is our contribution,” he said.