I met up with Dr. Stefanie Kempton after one of the long classes Florida Gulf Coast University sometimes schedules: News Production, 10:30 a.m. to 1:15 p.m.
She was more than ready for a sweet tea.
Her other two classes, Visual Storytelling and Journalistic Fact Finding, are held online. She prefers to teach in person but appreciates the flexibility of having two online classes during her first term at FGCU.
Kempton arrived in August as one of FGCU’s newest (of three) full-time faculty members, from Penn State’s Altoona campus. Her specialization is broadcast journalism. Her research focuses on representations of women in the media and the lived experiences of women media professionals.
She described many “green flags” – as opposed to red ones – on arriving at FGCU.
At Penn State Altoona, the student body compares similarly to FGCU, Kempton said, for the number of first-generation college students and those working to supplement their educations.
She also noticed right away that students approach the instructors to talk – another green flag.
She realizes her students can need reassurance about journalism as a major.
“Journalism is just so critical, so essential for democracy,” Kempton said. “I feel like we’ve really gotten away from that,” she said, citing problems of polarization and the tendency of news to slip into “infotainment.”
I didn’t prompt her, but Kempton had encouraging things to say about the public media model (full disclosure: I work for WGCU Public Media in Fort Myers). “Public media’s where a lot of the good stuff is coming from,” Kempton said.
She’s familiar with the university-held license model from WPSU, the central and north central Pennsylvania public media station. It’s the same licensure situation as found with WGCU, with FGCU holding the license.
Her goals for her students she stated succinctly: She wants to teach students how to ethically collect news, think for themselves, and disseminate that information in a way that allows people to make their own decisions.
That can be a challenge from the ground up for this generation, Kempton acknowledges, with so much of what they think of as news coming from social media. “They don’t even know what news is” in many cases, she said.
Kempton lives in Fort Myers with her husband and daughters, ages 3½ and 1½. The girls were surprised on their first visit to the FGCU Broadcast Building, where Kempton teaches, to find out that mom works with Daniel Tiger and Clifford the Big Red Dog – or at least it would appear so since there are posters of them on the walls.
Kempton started as a news reporter on camera, then made the switch to weather reporter for Accuweather in State College, Pa. She has anchored, reported on traffic and pretty much “done it all,” she said. She has appeared nationally on ABC News, Fox News, Bloomberg TV, and the Big Ten Network.
“I think from my grandfather down we have 25 or more degrees” from Penn State, she said. She’s responsible for three of those degrees.
Kempton’s grandparents lived in Fort Myers and were snowbirds for 35 years. Her first visit here was at about 6 months old, she said. Her husband’s father has a place in Fort Myers still, she said, and did when the couple met. We marveled at the “small world”ness of it all.
When she saw the ad for a job in Fort Myers in journalism, and the university wanted broadcast experience, she said she thought “Wait, is this a joke? It was too good to be true. And then I came here and met everyone and they’re so nice.”
Editor’s Note: Dayna Harpster serves on the Board of Governors of the Press Club of Southwest Florida and recently invited Dr. Kempton to apply for membership. The board unanimously and enthusiastically approved Kempton for membership and is grateful to Harpster for recruiting her. Harpster has worked full time in journalism for 38 years – at weeklies, monthlies, and mostly dailies. She was the editor for Expressions magazine for WGCU Public Media and now works as a communications specialist with the PBS station. She also teaches journalism classes for FGCU.
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