Sharing Stories with Impact

By Carolanne Roberts

To set the stage: When you print out the list of awards attached to David Garraway’s name, you almost run out of ink. The Excel document, with very small type and lots of lines, runs six pages. And that’s only the accolades since 2020.

These recognitions detail the journey of Mississippi State’s University Television Center where Garraway, a 2015 MBA graduate, serves as Director. Just this calendar year, the Center has earned seven Mississippi Association of Broadcasters awards; eight regional Emmy Awards (from 15 nominations); a regional Edward R. Murrow Award for News Documentary and a James Beard Foundation nomination for Documentary/Docuseries (the only university nominated).

Garraway isn’t resting on these laurels, seeing the attention as a means to move the program upward and enable more production.

“Those awards are selling our style for us, showing our approach,” he says. “We are attracting paying projects both inside and outside the university system. We go out and pitch and find funding for projects that serve the University’s mission.”

For instance, through the Center’s MSU Films arm, there’s XIII, a beautifully shot, sensitively rendered film centering on Gilroy Chow* and Ed Smylie, two Bulldog alumni in the space industry on opposite coasts. Each man was involved in solving the engineering problems that threatened the lives of Apollo 13’s three astronauts in 1970 when an oxygen tank failed. Viewing the film, you feel the tension and perceive the immediacy of the critical equipment failure while seeing and hearing the men as they look back down the years to that mission.

“Mississippi State graduates were inextricably involved in the plans and procedures that got those astronauts home,” remarks Garraway. “The film needs to scream, ‘Look what Mississippi State alumni have done,’ but our approach is sneaky. We let you get involved by telling it through those two people themselves.”

That approach of storytelling is an extension of Mississippi’s own fertile word-spinning heritage, and it creates magic.

This is our style,” says Garraway. “We tell the story and let you get involved. Our focus is to find stories that serve the University’s interests and tell them in a way people will want to watch them. It doesn’t matter what we do if people don’t watch.

For certain, people are watching. They learn about Mississippi’s severe food insecurity in The Hungriest State, the series which attracted the James Beard award nomination. Once again, the story is told through those with the experience; the plight and gnawing need is explained by Mississippians suffering hunger. Viewers also watch with mixed sadness and compassion the film Old Main, the story of the crippling fire that overtook and destroyed one of State’s most iconic dormitories in 1959. Alumnus Travis Clark, who survived the tragedy, tells the tale so vividly that you almost smell the smoke and feel the rising panic.

In other projects, the University Television Center’s staff of 10 addresses even such contemporary topics as land conservation and farm stress through the storytelling approach. Garraway’s leadership involves setting story direction, building a client base, overseeing the business side of the equation and, many times, problem solving.

“I love the process,” he states, recounting the day a producer requested he find an Apollo Command Module for XIII (he did, north of Atlanta). It was Garraway, too, who located Old Main survivor Travis Clark.

“If you look at Mississippi’s literary heavyweights, the storytelling aspect is natural – but it didn’t happen by my call,” he shares.

Garraway enthusiastically credits the talents of the Television Center’s James Parker, alumnus and Senior Documentary and Special Projects Producer, who introduced the concept and wraps important messages with just the right thoughts, quotes, scene-setting locations, voices and faces.

“It is through James that I learned the potential and power of much more in-depth creative storytelling,” he says.

Garraway, son of two educators in Hattiesburg, says his MBA has fueled his work at the University Television Center.

“I’m a firm believer in the power of education,” he states. “I had experience on the management development side but saw the MBA program as an opportunity to apply formal educational concepts to the informal self-taught – sometimes painful – education I’d given myself. The online program enabled me to take the courses around my schedule.

“Without a doubt, the MBA has given me confidence as I continue to grow the Center to maximize the efficiency of the University resources and [develop] our ability to go out and capture revenue external to the University to bring in dollars to support the facility.”

At the heart of it, Garraway is living his dream.

“I’m so incredibly fortunate because I’ve known what I wanted to do for as long as I remember,” he comments.

And he had tools to get started at a young age. Thanks to his computer science professor father, their family had a computer in the 1980s. Garraway also recalls pulling old tube-style video cameras and a VCR on his Radio Flyer wagon, shooting with the camera. By high school, he had bought his own professional equipment with money earned by filming weddings and dance recitals.

The MSU University Television Center team, with Garraway second from left, at the regional Emmy Awards.

Photo courtesy of David Garraway

Photo by Grace Cockrell

“And here I am 26 years after that first experience, still doing the thing I love!”

There’s more to come. Future projects include another round of The Hungriest State, set for 2023, plus an additional set of farm stress pieces. There is an “I was there”-style production called 9/20, which takes a look back at the 2001 MSU at South Carolina face-off, the first football game played following 9/11, at the request of the White House. A tough but important series on youth suicide and a piercing look at the failing oyster industry in Escambia Bay, FL – again, told by those involved and affected – are both in the plans.

“We have gotten aggressive now about finding great opportunities,” says Garraway. “We’re about to do a half-hour documentary about the Vietnamese population along the Mississippi Gulf Coast, where people were relocated after the conflict in the ’70s. The community is at risk of fading out as the new generations move away.”

To watch the University Television Center productions, visit films.msstate.edu. The Center also broadcasts on MSTV, the University’s own cable channel, carried on C Spire TV Channel 80 statewide. Some productions also appear on Mississippi Public Broadcasting, which reaches 2.5 million viewers.

“Sometimes I wonder how we do what we do,” marvels Garraway. “We just never pull back; we’re always working through the next hurdle. But I can assure you – watch everything we do. It’s all good.”

* To read more about Gilroy Chow, see p.2.