Spotlight: Michael Lynn, Student Media Asst. Director

By Nicole Shaker •

Michael Lynn gets up every morning, grabs a water bottle, says bye to his husky Luna, and heads to work.

He works at NSU as the assistant director of student media. His daily responsibilities vary, but mostly include troubleshooting technology, creating admissions videos, giving advice, handling administrative duties, and generally overseeing all three branches of student media (The Current, RadioX, and SUTV).

“Making the experience better for students is really rewarding,” said Lynn. “My favorite part of the job is making opportunities happen for students.”

But this job isn’t where his NSU journey started. In the summer of 2016, as a recent high school graduate, Lynn began volunteering for SUTV, NSU’s student-run TV station.

As a freshman at NSU, Lynn was hired as a camera operator and a video editor at SUTV and was soon promoted to co-station-manager.

Professor Juliette Kitchens, Lynn’s former professor, recalled being impressed by his content creation.

“He’s highly intelligent, and he respects the work he’s doing, which I think is not something I see in young creators as often as I do in more mature content creators,” Kitchens said. “His talent is mature beyond his years in the industry.”

As co-station-manager, Lynn began the biweekly Friday show SUTV Now, which still runs today.

He also began priming students to eventually take his place. Senior marketing major and current station manager of SUTV Paulina Riojas was a freshman when she met Lynn.

“He’s taught me everything I know today in production and I can’t thank him enough,” Riojas said.

During this time, he also volunteered as a DJ at RadioX, NSU’s student-run radio station.

Aidan Rivas, a 2020 communication with a concentration in digital media production alumnus, worked with Lynn in student media throughout his NSU undergraduate career and has collaborated with him on many freelance projects.

“He was a very strong leader. His ideas were always good, and he always executed,” Rivas said of Lynn’s time at SUTV. “I think that heavily contributed to him being accepted immediately in the [assistant] director position later.”

Lynn received his bachelor’s from NSU in communication with a concentration in journalism and a theater minor in May 2020. After graduation, he was hoping to find a job at NBC-6, but the COVID-19 pandemic put a damper on his plans.

“I was like, I need to continue my studies, so I can figure out what to do here,” Lynn said. “And so, I pursued a master’s. I also liked the idea of education because, in my undergrad as station manager, I liked teaching people.”

He pursued a master’s in composition, rhetoric, and digital media at NSU.

“He was such an active participant in the program and the department in undergrad that, by the time he came to the graduate program, we were all very familiar with him, his reputation, and the quality of work that we could expect,” Kitchens said. “He absolutely delivered.”

During this time, he wrote a thesis on how the pandemic has affected education and how technology influences education. He defended it in the spring.

Also during this time, he began entertaining the idea of becoming an adjunct professor. He has not done so yet, but Lynn hopes to eventually teach composition and humanities courses.

“Teaching is a fun time because you really get to see the gears turning in people’s minds,” Lynn said. “You get to learn about everybody’s own personal stories and goals and everybody wants a little bit of something else out of it.”

He graduated with his master’s in May 2022 and was also nominated by the Halmos College of Arts and Sciences for the “Student of the Year” STUEY (Student Life Achievement Award).

During his master’s education, Lynn worked in the NSU writing center as a graduate assistant coordinator. In December 2021, he left that role and became the assistant director of student media.

Although a high-school age Lynn dreamed of being an engineer, today, Lynn loves his job in student media.

“The cool part about student media is that not everybody comes from a journalistic-heavy background. We have computer science majors, psychology, marketing, all sorts of stuff,” said Lynn. “The beauty is you have all these people walking away from student media [with] a deeper appreciation of how productions build up. It’s a good way for people to communicate better and to build better relations with others.”

Lynn’s dual NSU student and staff experience helps him understand and appreciate the serendipitous opportunities all students can take advantage of at NSU.

“As a staff member, you realize how much work the professors, faculty and staff do to put their heart and soul into making it the best possible experience for the students,” Lynn said.

He also brings a unique perspective in terms of the evolution of student media.

“I have seen student media go through a multitude of different changes over the years,” said Lynn. “With each iteration, things get refined a little bit more.”

He shared that he has big plans for student media, to be executed alongside Christiane Delboni, the director of student media.

“Mike is the best thing that happened to me and this job,” Delboni said. “He is a gift I received along with the job.”

Lynn said he wants “student media to be the reputable source of media engagement for the entire NSU population and potentially the [South Florida] community at large.”

He would like RadioX to be the go-to place for underground artists to be heard, The Current to be so commonplace that it can always be seen in someone’s hands and for people to watch SUTV “all the time.” He plans to drive toward these goals by further integrating student media into NSU curricula, hosting tabling and other campus events, and refining the type of content being produced in each branch.

He wants to see more news-heavy content on SUTV, and for Radio X, “music that goes against the billboards”— as in, obscure, local artists that audiences wouldn’t hear anywhere else— as well as more DJ-audience interaction.

“I really want to go away from top forties music,” Lynn said.

But there’s a lot more to Lynn than just his job. 

When he’s not on NSU campus, he’s hanging out at Flamingo Gardens (his father used to be a tram driver there) or shopping for antiques and records to add to his expansive collections. 

His favorite antique is his cathode ray tube monitor (he eventually wants to make a CRT wall) and his favorite record set is, “Everywhere at the End of Time” by The Caretaker.

He often gravitates toward big-band jazz era and obscure records and regularly listens to indie, bedroom pop, western and experimental music on Spotify. One of his current song recommendations is, “Welcome to the Craft Store! ®” by nofriendsonline, which can be listened to on Bandcamp.

Lynn recommends other collectors go to local shops like Radio-Active Records and We Got the Beats, but he said that the best can usually be found “in the most obscure, hole-in-the-wall, really rural places.”

Some of his other hobbies include sewing patches on jackets, playing various instruments, practicing photography, fishing and cooking.

He is quite the foodie. You will most often see him at Mazzola’s Italian Restaurant with his family or at Flashback Diner, but he also enjoys Lester’s Diner and Cherry Smash.

When Lynn is on campus, Einstein’s Bagels is his usual spot. He gets the cinnamon sugar bagel with honey almond shmear or the everything bagel with onion and chive shmear, alongside his trustee vanilla hazelnut coffee.

And when he is not getting food, he is probably on the third floor of the University Center. He’ll be in his office, the SUTV studio or The Current newsroom, either discussing media initiatives with Delboni or engaging in a niche philosophical debate with any willing participant.

He described his personality as retro, hipster, underground, laid-back, creative, and “very, very old school.”

Riojas described him as “super kind, always willing to help, very knowledgeable, and the best guy ever.”

You also may see him in the Rosenthal building, making banter with RadioX staff.

Evan Kelley, senior communication major with a concentration in journalism and program director at RadioX, has worked with Lynn for a year and also shared a class with him when she was a freshman and he was a senior in undergrad.

“If I had one word to describe him, it would just be goofy,” Kelly said.

Lynn’s main goal is to engage more of the NSU population with student media, as he said, “people from the farthest reach that you could imagine.”

“You don’t need to have a journalistic background,” Lynn said. “You just need to have that passion for it.”

He advises students to get involved wherever their passions lie.

“You could trailblaze and leave a legacy for yourself and get involved and get your name out there and really do something special,” Lynn said. “An engaged student is a well-performing one. And you might pick up some cool skills along the way that you may not have thought you needed.”