People On Campus for October 2002
First Monday
People On Campus
  People On Campus is published in FirstMonday by the Public Affairs and Publications offices at SFSU. 415/338-1665. pubcom@sfsu.edu


Phil Kipper -- A master of media

Phil KipperStudents looking to Phil Kipper, chairman of the Broadcast and Electronic Communication Arts department (BECA), for career advice are in luck. A former reporter and magazine writer, he has also written for military publications and freelanced for National Public Radio, giving him a unique perspective on the inner workings of the media.

His experiences included a "dream job" working from an office in the Seattle police department in the late 1960s, as a police reporter with the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. On a shift that ran from 5 p.m. to 2 a.m., he was one of only a few reporters on a night beat. "The paper had multiple editions, so during that period I was the main reporter for breaking news, anything the police were involved in," he said. He wrote stories for several nighttime editions of the paper.

Using a typewriter to compose his stories and a Teletype to relay them to the newsroom is a far cry from the digital video equipment that Kipper, 60, deals with now.

As BECA chairman, Kipper has worked tirelessly to update the department's video and production equipment. His achievements include securing more than $1.3 million in grants for the New Television Project, which Kipper founded as part of a three-year fundraising drive to raise $3 million for digital television production equipment.

Through grants from Panasonic and other companies, the department has been able to purchase digital equipment for the broadcast journalism curriculum. College of Creative Arts Dean Keith Morrison, Kipper's boss, considers the grants, and Kipper's work to raise the program's public perception, some of his greatest accomplishments.

So how did Kipper transition from the written word to pictures and spoken media?

"I've always been a photographer," said the Washington State native. "When I started out at the Daily World, in Wenatchee, Wash. in the early 1960s, reporters took their own photos, so I would go into a meeting and think of how to shoot the images as well as write the story," he said. "It's pretty much the same thing. You're producing something, looking at a subject and trying to see how to (depict) it."

His interest in visual media and how images shape perception first sent him to SFSU as a graduate student in the mid-1970s, almost 10 years after leaving the University of Washington with a bachelor's degree in political science and journalism.

After graduating with a master's degree in radio and television in 1978, Kipper left SFSU for the University of Utah, where he earned a Ph.D. in communication in 1983. He returned to California to teach and coordinate the communication program at Mills College in Oakland.

Kipper's five years at the women's college prepared him for SFSU, where more than half of the BECA program's students are female. He's been on the faculty since 1987.

"When I was a graduate student, about half the program was female, but I noticed the guys were very hands-on, and the women were kind of shy about it," he said. "I don't see that anymore. The women are just as technically capable, working as technical editors and in video production. I think things have definitely gotten better."

Kipper teaches classes in writing for television and interactive media, television production and performance, experimental production and broadcast interviewing. He's also working on preliminary research for a book that will explore how recording has changed the way people view culture and history, and how they perceive events.

BECA graduates are now news anchors and producers around the country, print reporters and even a case manager with the War Crimes Tribunal prosecutor's office in The Hague, Netherlands.

Kipper credits the program's liberal arts focus with preparing students for a wide variety of jobs.

"There's a lot of stress on writing, and we blend theory and practice, the analysis of media content and production," he said.

But Morrison and BECA alums credit Kipper and other faculty with helping their students succeed.

BECA alumna Kristi Nakamura, who earned a master's degree in 2001, is preparing for a job in Houston as a television reporter for a cable news station that launches in December. She said the department's willingness to look out for its students contributed to her success at landing a job.

"Before San Francisco State, I went to UCLA, which is a really big school. And it never occurred to me that the chair of my department would want to sit down and talk with me about what I want to do, what my goals are, that he'd really be that open," she said. "He cares about his students, he really wants to see us all succeed. He's very accessible and easy to talk to, and he truly wants to help us."

--Clair McDevitt

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