MHC Student by Day, Broadcast Journalist by Nights and Weekends: The Double Life of Gail Ballantyne '00

While Ballantyne's restlessness certainly doesn't attract attention in class, her attire is a bit unusual for a student. In order to make it to the TV station in time to report live on the news at five, she arrives at the class sporting what she describes as "poofy hair," which is secured with a heavy dose of hair spray. Makeup hides her naturally pale complexion (she'll apply even more when she arrives at the station), and she is dressed in tailored professional garb.

Gail Ballantyne's bifurcated life as a professional reporter/student began last December when she saw an ad on the Web for a part-time reporting job at NEWS40. A veteran of four internships in broadcast journalism, including one at ABC News in Washington last spring, and two stints as an anchor at college television stations, Ballantyne decided to apply. She sent out a tape of her on-air reporting at American University, where she studied journalism last spring, and to her surprise she got the job.

She now works thirty hours a week as a reporter and assignment editor while juggling three classes and an independent study. Since she is the new person on the block, her assignments are not always the most glamorous ones, but Ballantyne seems to thrive on "finding an angle" to make even the most mundane story interesting. During a recent story on flooding in a Springfield parking garage, she donned a wet suit, borrowed from a local firefighter, to report from the scene. Her report on the effects of rampant crow waste in Springfield during the unusually warm weather this winter found her interviewing employees at a car wash where she had taken her own vehicle to be cleansed of the bird waste days before she got the assignment.

Dave Madsen, anchor and managing editor at NEWS40, has high praise for Ballantyne. "Gail is a remarkable young lady. In the thirty years I've been in broadcasting, I have never see someone of her age demonstrate such a high level of maturity and talent and such a breadth of experience," he says. "She has a very bright future in this business."

Ballantyne credits Mount Holyoke for "teaching her how to think. You can learn a job by getting experience," she says. Ballantyne has worked with Kent Polk, acting director of the Weissman Center's Speaking Center, to hone her on-air skills and to build confidence, and she found a community development class taught by Preston Smith, associate professor of politics, "invaluable in understanding Holyoke," the focus of several of her stories. At present, history professor and media maven Dan Czitrom is helping her design a broadcast journalism major to augment her other major in American studies.

Says Czitrom, "Gail has impressed me greatly with her drive, ambition, and eagerness to learn all she can about the journalism profession and its history. I saw real evidence of this in her work in my seminar last fall on Reading the New York Times. Gail's work in and outside of class reflects her strong desire to connect learning the craft of journalism with a deeper understanding of the recent American past."

Not surprisingly, Ballantyne hopes to pursue a full-time career in broadcast journalism after graduation. This is probably for the best. As she nears the end of her Mount Holyoke career, Ballantyne acknowledges that after working on so many one-minute stories for television, "[ her ] attention span for a three-hour class is just about shot."