University of Pittsburgh Athletics
Media Renaissance Man
1/10/2024 10:00:00 AM | General
After years of practice, Kevin Smith is an early riser, one who regularly gets to Pitt's campus at 4:45 a.m. for a television and news practicum course that he teaches at 6 a.m. on Fridays.
At first, the early arrival allowed Smith to begin his workday in solitude at a time when few others are on campus—if they're even awake at all. Soon enough, though, something funny started to happen: Smith wasn't alone for very long.
Virtually any college student will find an early morning class to be a challenge, let alone one that begins before the sun rises, but by 5:15, Smith noticed that he had more than half of his students already in the building.
"The students race me to the class," he says with a laugh.
If racing to class at that hour seems unusual, it's because it is. But then again, Pitt's burgeoning television and broadcast arts program led by Smith is anything but ordinary.
The latest step in the lengthy career of a media Renaissance man who has written screenplays, worked in radio, produced and appeared on air for television and reported for newspapers is at his alma mater, where he teaches and helped to design the curriculum for a television and broadcast arts certificate program that didn't exist at the University only a handful of years ago. With Pitt Studios at the Petersen Events Center serving as a laboratory of sorts, the program has grown significantly over the course of its relatively short existence, comprehensively preparing students through its classes and ultimately setting them up for fruitful professional opportunities after graduation.
Though Smith isn't one to take credit for that rapid rise, his work and diligence have been invaluable in not only getting the nascent field of study off the ground but getting it to a point that has far exceeded most reasonable expectations.
"The University of Pittsburgh is not me. It's not the administration. It's the students," Smith says. "That's the key to the whole University. That's what I found out when I was here.
That's the object of what we're doing. This has to be the students. They have to own it. They have to want it. They have to love it. It's their curriculum, and that's what it's become. I'm just kind of the caretaker of it. They're the ones who make it work."
In the 18-credit certificate program, which is part of the University's Film and Media Studies Program, students receive instruction and training in production and on-air work. The expanding curriculum has been designed by Smith over the past five years, starting from a blank slate into something much more substantive after what Smith admitted was a bit of a trial-and-error process.
When Smith began to create the program, he questioned what exactly he wanted from it. So, almost 40 years after his days as a student on campus, he began taking classes again, giving him the valuable chance to get an up-close, in-depth view of what his pupils faced.
"I did that because I wanted to understand what the demands were on the student and what the stresses were on the student," Smith says. "That way, I could design the curriculum for the student—not for me, just for the student.
That helped me immensely. I got a good understanding of what they want."
Even without that immersive experience, Smith can relate to his Pitt students on a fundamental level. After all, he was once in their position.
A New Jersey native, Smith arrived in Oakland in 1978 to play football during a time in which the Panthers were among the sport's best, most dominant programs. All these years later, he can still remember walking down Forbes Avenue on one of his first days on campus and seeing the Cathedral of Learning pop up in the distance. The mere sight of the iconic 535-foot building reassured him that he had not only chosen a college but found a home.
"The campus, the city, everything lived up to what I hoped and prayed it would be," Smith says. "All these years later, I'm back here, and it feels like home. It has always felt like home from the moment I stepped on campus."
Smith was part of the Pitt football program at an opportune time. The Panthers went 41-7 over Smith's four seasons at the school and had future NFL players at virtually every position, THE 1981 PITT PANTHER FOOTBALL TEAM "Kevin (front row, #1) with the 1981 Pitt football team. including five who went on to become Pro Football Hall of Famers. A wide receiver, Smith was awed by the talent around him, particularly a young quarterback he caught balls from by the name of Dan Marino, but with that came a realization.
"Trust me, I wasn't anything significant whatsoever on the team with that kind of talent," he says. "By sophomore year, I was like 'OK, I wonder what I'm going to do for a living?'"
It didn't take long for that question to be answered.
Shortly after leaving Oakland, the proud Pitt grad began working in New York City radio, doing sports, writing comedy and working in the mailroom for a variety style morning show called "The Morning Zoo" that competed against the likes of Howard Stern and Don Imus.
From there, he returned to Pittsburgh to write for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette while putting in additional hours learning the nuances of television a few blocks away at KDKA-TV. His hours of watching the behind-the-scenes magic of television helped him to put together a reel, which he sent out to various stations only to get, he says, "500 billion rejections." WTAE-TV, however, hired him as a writer and producer. He rewarded their faith, earning the station three Regional Emmy nominations and winning an Edward R. Murrow Award for outstanding achievements in broadcast and digital journalism.
For years, Smith had an interest in screenwriting. Earlier in his career, he had a chance meeting with director, producer and writer Bruce Paltrow while watching a New York Knicks game at a movie wrap party and asked to pick his brain. Paltrow became Smith's first mentor. Even as he worked at newspapers and television stations, he found time to craft scripts. As he saw it, it wasn't work, it was fun.
It was at his next stop, as an executive producer for the Pittsburgh Penguins, when a new door opened. After working up the gumption to ask him, Smith had then Penguins owner Howard Baldwin, a prominent movie producer, read some scripts he had written and provide him with some notes. Baldwin was impressed and convinced Smith to send his scripts to studios. Within a couple of weeks, two of those scripts were optioned, and before he knew it, Smith was moving to Los Angeles, California.
Over two decades, he wrote for and worked with Academy Award-nominated Kevin and his former teammate, Dan Marino, on a TV pilot shoot at South Stadium in Pittsburgh actors, directors and producers on films, television comedies and dramas, and miniseries. Perhaps the most notable of the projects on which he worked was "Pride," a 2007 film starring Terrence Howard that Smith cowrote about a man who started and coached an allBlack swim team in 1970s Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
With most of his relatives back East and a chance to work remotely, he and his family moved to Pittsburgh six years ago. A group of friends took him on a tour of the early stages of Pitt Studios, when it was largely a barren space. He was shown renderings and images of what it ultimately would look like, but it was hard to imagine it in that moment.
When he was asked if he wanted to be involved, he initially balked. But when he found out that Pitt's associate athletic director for broadcast and video production, Paul Barto, was heading the project, his mind quickly changed. The two knew each other from Smith's days at WTAE, when Barto was a college student at Waynesburg University but would come up to Pittsburgh, edit all night, sleep on the floor and go back in the morning for class. Smith always remembered that drive, which was paired with an intelligence in the field that made Barto, in Smith's words, "a certified genius."
"Knowing Paul was running the place, there was zero chance I would have said no, because he's that good," Smith says. "If you get a chance to work with people who are literally the best in an industry, you never say no. It's as simple as that. That's why I said yes."
As a teaching professor and director of undergraduate studies in broadcast, Smith has spent the past several years using the resources available at Pitt Studios to maximize and enhance the experience of his students. With the help of Barto, Assistant Athletic Director of Broadcast and Video Production Casey Garrow and others, Pitt Studios, widely regarded as the best in-house broadcast facility in the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC), has been an essential tool in the curriculum Smith designed.
He studied how programs at top broadcast journalism schools like Syracuse, Missouri and Northwestern were structured and wanted to see how Pitt could differentiate itself. It has inherent advantages many of those other schools don't have, namely its location in the middle of a major city with a number of local television and radio stations along with three professional sports teams.
"Setting Pitt's program apart from the others was the number-one goal of the curriculum when I came in," Smith says. "I said this is what will separate us. This will put us above everybody else. Give me five to 10 years and we'll crush all those other places. Nobody will even be close. [And] that's what's happened."
Between the instruction they received in the program and their own personal determination, many of Smith's former students have excelled after leaving Pitt. Among the positions those pupils have accepted following their graduation are as a technical director for last year's World Cup in Qatar and this year's Women's World Cup in Australia and New Zealand; a coordinating producer for the ACC Network; and one of the heads of postproduction for "Dear Mama," an FX documentary series on the late rapper Tupac Shakur and his mother, Afeni.
Even in the program's infancy, Smith says that it has a level of talent comparable to Pitt football in the 1970s, and once its reputation grows, he thinks it's only going to get better.
"Usually, you get one of those [students you know is going to be a big success] every couple of years. We had three or four right away in the first class," Smith says. "They were able to transition quickly. It got the other students excited, like 'Oh shoot, they're already working professionally? This is the place to go.'"
Perhaps the clearest example of the work being done by students in Smith's television and news practicum course is found in a program called "Pitt to the Point," a one-hour news magazine show similar to "CBS Sunday Morning." On the show, which re-airs on KDKA's streaming platform on Saturdays, students have gotten the chance to interview newsmakers at the center of stories of national and international interest, from the Ukrainian ambassador to the United States to Gay Willis, a lead actress in "The Phantom of the Opera."
Student after student has told Smith that it's the most challenging course they've taken at Pitt but also the most rewarding. It has set them up well for life beyond Pitt, too, as Smith says that students from the class are going on job interviews just six weeks into the term.
"It [the television and news practicum course] challenges you in every phase," Smith says. "These kids are more experienced and more professional than people who have been in the industry for 20 years."
Through those hours of instruction and countless conversations outside class, Smith has gotten to enjoy one of the greatest benefits of teaching: the bond he has forged with his students. It's something that has made his time back at Pitt that much more gratifying.
"The best part is I get to take all the stuff that's happened to me and share it, not just with my [own] kid but with the students, who become my kids," he says. "I've got 130 of them now.
