Grand Avenue Baptist Case Study

Media Specialist: Internship at Grand Avenue Baptist

Grand Avenue Baptist

Grand Avenue Baptist has been on the corner of Grand Avenue and North 39th street for over eighty years. Since September 9th, 1934, its mission has been to witness to the River Valley that Jesus is the son of God, provide a place for Christians to grow, and serve the community through partnerships and programs. In the decades that have passed since its beginning, the church has grown from a staked down tent and a tiny congregation of a mere five people into one of the staple churches of the Fort Smith area. Grand Avenue now boasts a congregation of several thousand and has a thriving ministry programs for all ages and stages of life including family, singles, and collegiate

The media specialist works in conjunction with associate pastors to create and refine material used for the church bulletins, weekly internal videos, sermon series, and any advertisements that may need to be created for their programs. Additionally, he oversees and delegates volunteers to help with production on Sunday and Wednesday nights, and any special media projects the church creates. The media specialist’s position is a demanding job, requiring a wide breadth of technological communicative knowledge; additionally, the media specialist must be flexible and be able to react to whatever ideas are thrown their way and be efficient enough to work within a constrained timetable if need be.

The Roles of the Media Specialist.

The official position of the Media Specialist has only just recently been created. Weston Jones, my supervisor, was appointed the position in August 2016, receiving it from Scott Ward, the missions pastor. Previously, position was held by Scott in conjunction with other responsibilities, curtailing the amount of media the church could produce. In this new position, Weston has revamped the media program and greatly increased the media production at Grand Avenue. His position includes weekly copywriting, photography, graphic design and editing, marketing,

Recalling the roles learned in Broadcast for New Media, I was prepared to act as Technical Director and even instruct new volunteers how to perform their roles as camera operators. Instructing them on the rule of thirds, broadcasting terminology, and what is expected during production.

Lesser Roles

In addition to these two main roles, I helped Weston Monitor Grand’s social media accounts and use SEO tactics to increase traffic. In this area, Dr. Reamer’s Survey of New Media gave a lot of peripheral information, but I had not had any hands-on experience. Weston showed me their account managers and explained how he uses the data to make decision about which posts to boost and when.

Concepts Acquired

Some concepts I was not prepared for was the maintenance of equipment’s and the mass of data that was created each week. Some of the tools Weston used to maintain and transfer data back and forth from Computers, networks, shared folders, and external hard drives was dizzying, and the number of dongles and accoutrements he used to enhance his computer and camera rig was astounding. By the end of the semester I had several of the applications on my own mac, and plan to implement his strategies to clean up both the user interface and disk space of my