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A new streaming service delivers two-to-three-minute stories about the business ramifications of various news stories, including the end of the pandemic, the decline of food stamp funding, the alleged greenwashing by a soft drink titan and other events. There’s also a series dedicated to local sports teams, plus live-streamed games, as well as longform documentaries covering subjects like the impact of natural disasters and racial injustice on citizens of New Orleans. There’s educational programming about cooking and idiom origin stories and, rounding the content out even further, some presentations of short fictional films.
The near something-for-everyone nature of the content on Hawk+ feels like the approach to programming taken by many of today’s leading streamers — Netflix, Amazon Prime, Max and Peacock, just to name a few. At times the production quality on Hawk+ rivals that of anything on those platforms, too.
The catch? It’s all been dreamt up, packaged and delivered by college students.
“Even though our students were very literate in all kinds of digital platforms, we didn’t have one where you could see student news, athletics, student films, the specials, the documentaries that we do here, the speakers we bring in,” says Mark Effron, a professor at Montclair State University and the New Jersey school’s news lab coordinator. “It just seemed to me that it made perfect sense. If we could figure out a way, within the confines of [the] budget — we’re not Warner Bros.