This shot is from “Wisconsin’s Mining Standoff,” on Al Jazeera America Saturday. Credit: Josh Rushing for Al Jazeera America

Student television journalists at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee made news of their own this week, winning a Murrow Award for journalistic excellence and beating out national commercial and professional news organizations in doing so.

PantherVision, a weekly broadcast by television reporting and news management students in the journalism, advertising and media studies department at the school, won best continuing coverage for a series of reports collectively titled "School Shooter Safety: An Act of Malpractice."

Both classes are taught by Mark Zoromski, who is also the broadcast's advising producer.

"Everybody I talked to at RTDNA" — the Radio Television Digital News Association, which presents the awards — "said this is probably unprecedented. No one heard of a class-based student television news organization winning a Murrow Award" since the awards began in 1971, said Zoromski, who was a news producer at WITI-TV (Channel 6) from 1983 to 1996.

"The kids in my reporting class walk in never having done a television news story in their lives," said Zoromski. "They go through four weeks of boot camp" on how to shoot film, record sound and edit.

And they watch "examples of exceptional broadcast journalism," which includes "a lot of Boyd Huppert," a former WITI reporter now at KARE-TV in Minneapolis, who won two Murrow Awards this year, bringing his total to 12.

Zoromski said Huppert excels at "great, great storytelling" through "personalization and humanization and finding stories that every other reporter walks by because they don't think it's a story."

Afterward, Zoromski said, the class is "turned into a television newsroom," complete with a weekly Friday news meeting at which assignments handed out are due the following Thursday.

PantherVision is also "a unique educational marriage" between UWM — whose students generate the content — and Milwaukee Area Technical College, where the newscast is taped and whose students handle the technical aspects.

CNN reported that there have been 74 school shootings in the 18 months since the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings, including one Tuesday at an Oregon high school.

PantherVision coverage on the issue in 2013 included the discovery that at UWM: classroom doors could not be locked from inside; there was low participation in an opt-in system for text alerts, compared with opt-out programs with much higher participation; and that there were no lockdown drills, no campuswide alert system and no training sessions for students or employees.

PantherVision aired "dozens" of stories, Zoromski said. "There was a package in almost every newscast." The broadcasts likely contributed to the school forming a "working group" to study the issue. It released its recommendations in April.

"That's why I'm so proud of these students," said Zoromski. "This is not investigating dirty dining or something like that. This is important, critical stuff that these students have done, and we will never know if maybe someday down the road their reporting saves a life."

Zoromski, meanwhile, is considering using "Kickstarter and a bake sale" to raise about $10,000 to take the students to New York for the Murrow Awards ceremony in October.

The Murrow Awards are named after prominent CBS radio and television journalist Edward R. Murrow. WTMJ-AM (620) and executive news producer Erik Bilstad won in the features category for a story on a school in Hartland that preserved the memories of World War II soldiers and Holocaust survivors.

During the school year, PantherVision can be seen on Time Warner Cable, AT&T U-Verse, and at panthertv3.imt.uwm.edu/panthervision/panthervision.html and milwaukeecommunitymedia.com/?s=PantherVision.

Documentaries come in all shapes and perspectives, including, says Milwaukee-based filmmaker Brad Lichtenstein, "viewpoints from underrepresented points of view critical of American political and cultural issues."

His previous film, "As Goes Janesville," in which the repercussions of the GM plant closing play out against the backdrop of budget battles in Madison, aired on PBS.

His latest film, "Wisconsin's Mining Standoff," produced with UWM film grad Colin Sytsma and Shorewood native Devon Cupery, airs at 6 p.m. Saturday on the Al Jazeera America series "Fault Lines."

The film grew out of research by Sytsma and Cupery into plans for a $1.5 billion open-pit mine in the Penokee mountain range — considered the Alps of Wisconsin, and in sight of Lake Superior — that have drawn opposition from American Indian tribes and residents.

"It's a pretty complicated...but important story with a lot at stake," Lichtenstein said. And so "we were careful to meet the high journalistic standards" of a news network like Al Jazeera America.

Cupery has an environmental science background, Lichtenstein said, and was "key in helping normal people...understand the nuances of iron ore mining" and its potential for contamination. He called her "our queen of fact-checking," and said her practice of assembling a briefing book has been adopted by Al Jazeera.

The story is being reported by "Fault Lines" correspondent Josh Rushing. Al Jazeera America can be seen on Time Warner Channel 376, DirecTV Channel 347 and DISH network Channel 215.

The filmmakers are also hosting a screening party at Camp Bar, 4044 N. Oakland Ave., Shorewood, Saturday from 5 to 7 p.m.

In an item on Chris James Thompson's ESPN film about Robert Indiana's pop art floor for the old Milwaukee Arena, I misstated the title of his earlier film, "The Jeffrey Dahmer Files." It is currently streaming on Netflix.

Gene Wilder, star of "Blazing Saddles" and "Young Frankenstein," will be guest programmer on Turner Classic Movies Tuesday, presenting four of his favorite films: "Random Harvest" (1942), with Greer Garson, at 7 p.m.; "The Merry Widow" (1934), with Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald, 9:15 p.m.; "Witness for the Prosecution" (1957), with Charles Laughton and Marlene Dietrich, 11:15 p.m.; and "Dark Victory" (1939), with Bette Davis, 1:30 a.m.

Wilder was born in Milwaukee in 1935 as Jerome Silberman and graduated from Washington High School. He made his film debut in 1966 in "Bonnie and Clyde" and received Oscar nominations for supporting actor for "The Producers" and for the screenplay for "Young Frankenstein."

Email: ddudek@journalsentinel.com