Jordan D. Brown and Alex Ederson with The MSU Spokesman
Morgan State University’s multimedia department has seen a complete 360, taking inspiration from the content produced at top Division I universities to completely revamp the athletics’ presence of social media.
The team leading the change? A group of nearly 20 student interns.
It all started with Randolph Brent, a class of 2021 graduate from Morgan, who joined the athletic’s digital media department as an student intern in 2018.
A former student athlete, Brent joined the digital media team after he played one year on the university’s football team.
“I finished playing on the football team and then I kind of started doing the creative content for the football team, doing coaches film,” Brent said. “Then they needed some highlights and pictures and things like that and it kind of bloomed from 2018 to now.”
Brent said the process of expanding the team beyond himself started by taking whoever walked through the door with a camera to shoot and was ready to work. The team grew to a group of four with student photographers Sebastian Taylor, Emmanuel Durojaiye, and Kelia Briscoe.
As the needs of the department expanded to social media, graphic design, and interviews, more student forces like Melanie Battle, Justin Cone, Jordan Martinez, and Tobechi Mezu joined the group.
With this solid foundation, the group cultivated MSU Creatives, a brand to solidify the team as the creators within the athletics’ multimedia department and unify all of their work.
“This year was really kind of where we locked in and we were like, okay, we got something here, we started to work out the kinks. This is where we really wanted to set ourselves apart and make our voice heard on campus as we are an official entity of this school, of this athletics department,” Brent said.
Since MSU Creatives launched, the university’s athletic pages on social media have dominated across platforms. Even beyond the university’s most popular sports of basketball and football, teams like volleyball, bowling and tennis have seen increased engagement.
The football team’s Twitter account is the highest-followed page under the athletic department with 18,800 followers.
Cimone Austin, social media manager for the athletic department, said the most special thing about this year is the increased coverage for all of Morgan’s sports.
The class of 2022 Morgan graduate said, “I think in the past, we didn’t really necessarily cover every single sport and this year we covered every single sport. Volleyball was one of them that I’m really proud about because I don’t feel like volleyball had a lot of media coverage in past years, but we made it a goal to cover volleyball.”
The @msucreatives page on Instagram was created in the fall semester to start off football season and create a place to publish students’ work outside of the athletics’ pages.
“Back in the fall, we started the page and it was really just as kind of an ever evolving portfolio and resume for them, for the students to showcase their work. Let people know who are the names and faces behind the camera that they may see on game day and see putting out all this dope content,” Brent said.
The official Instagram account for the athletic program’s multimedia and marketing team, @msucreatives, has seen new heights on the platform since its launch in November.
So far, their page has earned almost 400 followers and the Instagram reach expanded to 18,750 users.
“You put in the work, you’re going to get rewarded”
As only a select of the MSU Creatives interns are paid, most interns start off unpaid. Martinez, a senior multimedia journalism major, moved up from an unpaid intern to a paid position, and credits her dedication to the team for her promotion.
“I was coming to every event, every basketball game, going to football workouts, and kind of like earn my spot to get paid and to show that I wanted to be here and to do and just to be a part of the team. And honestly it paid off,” Martinez said.
Taylor, a sophomore multiplatform production major, said it was a challenge to stay motivated while working for no money, but he kept his main goal of elevating sports through his content at the forefront of his mind.
“So for me it got hard to stay motivated sometimes, because it’s like well I’m not getting this, my photos aren’t being tagged, this that and the third. But I realized that it was bigger. than me. The main reason why I started to join was to put HBCU sports on the map. That’s bigger than Sebastian Taylor, and whatever money or agenda or tag,” Taylor said.
“I think as I got more involved, more committed it became how can I elevate Morgan State sports? How can this be the best it could be? That was the motivation, it wasn’t the money,” Taylor said.
His mindset on the matter was if students put in the work now, they’ll get rewarded later.