Volume 8, Number 3, 1999


Master of the message

As a globetrotting field producer for the Discovery Channel series Travelers, Benjamin Ringe, AS '93, had to adapt to all kinds of extreme shooting conditions.

For the series, which presented world cultures through their celebrations and city life, he sweated it out in a small village in Africa, shivered in the Arctic Circle and hiked up to remote areas of the Andes.

No matter how exotic the location, Ringe says, he found himself drawing on a key experience at Delaware: His two-year stint as a resident assistant, an experience he says taught him important life lessons and critical communication skills.

"Being an RA, I learned more about communication than I would have if I'd gone into communications," says Ringe, who is now a development producer for Philadelphia-based Banyan Productions, which produced Travelers.

"The Residence Life instructors really taught you how to listen. I thought, 'Wow, what an art form.' Listening is the most underrated part of communications. People think it's about speaking, but it is not."

Ringe, who also has worked as a production assistant and associate producer for KYW-TV's The Bulletin with Larry Kane in Philadelphia and as a producer on The Learning Channel's series Reunions, didn't realize the impact-both professional and personal-the RA job would have on his future when he was selected for a position in Russell Hall C his sophomore year.

During his junior year, he was an RA in Harrington Hall D, where, through a former resident, he met Bobbi Jo Junguzza, AS '94, whom he married in 1998.

"I was shocked by what I could learn," says Ringe, who spoke of the job's real-world applications during an RA training at the University last year. "If there is a problem, they taught us how to open up the lines of communication. Sometimes, it can be as simple as telling someone how you feel and owning your statements by saying, 'I feel this....'"

Ringe has been able to put those skills to good use. As an English-journalism major, he never intended to make a career in television. His first writing experience came at the student-run newspaper, The Review, where he was a columnist and assistant news editor. "I always wanted to do feature writing for magazines," says Ringe, whose father was a producer for NFL Films. "I thought TV was a vast wasteland."

His view changed considerably after he landed an internship at KYW-TV during his senior year. Working with the station's investigative news team, he discovered he had a passion and a talent for the production end of TV. "I found it so interesting to tell a story with pictures and words," he recalls. "It was just so intriguing."

After graduation, he was hired as a production assistant at KYW, and was working there in 1995, when he heard about a new show called Travelers. He landed a job there at a fortuitous moment. Layoffs were announced at KYW just as he was ready to leave. He moved a few blocks away to Banyan's headquarters in the Old City section of Philadelphia, but he didn't spend much time in the office the next two years.

Travelers, which still can be seen on the Discovery Channel, features six young adventurers exploring the world. Over the course of its two-year run, Ringe visited nearly 20 locations. The show introduced him to a world of startling contrasts. One week, he might go to Yellowknife, Canada, for the Caribou Carnival, a celebration of spring where the temperature rose to -40 degrees, while a few months later, he would find himself in Helsinki, Finland, where there was less than an hour of darkness each day, for the Midsummer Night Festival.

His favorite destination? San Jose, Costa Rica, where he enjoyed the openness of the people and the many outdoor activities so much that he returned there for his honeymoon.

For Travelers, he worked on a crew of eight. "It was a team atmosphere," Ringe says. "Everyone had to do everything. It was reality-based television, meaning whatever happened, happened."

Subsequent to Travelers, Ringe worked on Reunions, a Banyan production for The Learning Channel (TLC). As the title suggests, the show documents reunions, offering a behind-the-scenes look at the days leading up to an actual event. One especially memorable program spotlighted two Holocaust survivors who had not seen each other in 55 years. The man and woman were reunited with about 20 survivors of a group of 100 children sent by their parents during World War II to hide in a castle in La Hille, France. All lost their parents, but, amazingly, only six of the original group died in the Holocaust.

"What an experience to be with the people who had escaped the Nazis," Ringe says. "What an honor to sit down with people who lived through this."

These days, Ringe has moved away from production chores to developing original programs. He's not allowed to discuss what's on his plate, not until a show is ready for production. "It's top-secret work," Ringe says. "There is no shortage of good ideas out there in the world, but it's about developing these ideas into good programming. You achieve that by listening to your subjects and viewers, and working as a team." *

-Robert DiGiacomo, AS '88