The FHS mass media classes hosted a day-long telethon on Thursday, March 30th. The telethon was able to be watched on the 3:40’s YouTube channel with behind-the-scenes footage on Instagram Live. Senior Jillian Blackburn was one of the class members that hosted the event. 

   “We’ve been talking about [the telethon] since October,” Blackburn said. “It was Mr. Torres’s idea, but I really developed it with. the help of my classmates and even some friends who just threw out ideas for stuff they wanna see on the show.” 

    The show was streamed from seven-thirty AM to two PM, giving the team six and a half hours of content to find for the stream. 

    “We had lots of interviews,” Blackburn said. “We had Mr. Lawrence come on with some of the animals that he has in his class. We had a snake, a gecko and a bearded dragon. We have jeopardy and we’ll be doing a hot wings interview.”

    The telethon was originally supposed to include live music from student bands Newsroom and Neighborhood Plumbers but they were unfortunately unable to play because of YouTube copyright laws. Junior Casey Alexander was part of making sure that the stream on YouTube ran smoothly. 

    “Figuring out how to actually stream was difficult because the school didn’t provide us the equipment necessary for that long of a stream,” Alexander said. “We had to use Blake’s home PC, my camera, and my capture cards to get a consistently good stream all day.”

    Although making sure the stream ran successfully was stressful, there were lots of fun events to watch throughout the day. 

    “Running tech all day was kind of exhausting, but I had my own segment, and that was a lot of fun,” Alexander said. “Also the “hot ones” parody we did was a lot of fun to watch, especially since I made a few of those hot sauces myself.” 

    Typically telethons are broadcasted in order to raise money for charities or, but the team had the goal of student participation in mind. One portion of the stream included a raffle that students could sign up for.  

    “We wanted to be more public and have more students be actively involved and engaged in our process, but if I am completely honest, we just wanted to see if we could do it,” Alexander said. 

    The telethon was enjoyable for the students watching as well as the students hosting it. The stream is still able to be rewatched on the 3:40 YouTube channel. 

    “The most stressful part about doing today was just the planning itself,” Blackburn said. “Actually running the live stream has been very relaxing because I know that no matter what happens, there’s always a clip that can be rolled or a screen that can be put up to say we’ll be right back.”