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Teen of the Week: Belpre’s Alivia Mercer wants to pursue a career in broadcasting

Alivia Mercer at the Boys and Girls Club of Parkersburg, where she volunteers. (Photo by James Dobbs)

PARKERSBURG — Alivia Mercer, 16, is interested in broadcasting.

Mercer attends school at Washington County Career Center as a junior, where she studies videography and graphic design. She said the Career Center teaches graphic design students Photoshop and other similar editing programs. She said the technical programs the Career Center offers give students better opportunities in life. She said the videography program comes with a lot of freedom and has students roaming the campus with film equipment.

“I’m interested in going into broadcast as a career, but most people, when I say broadcast think I want to be in front of the camera, that is the complete opposite,” she said. “I like running the stuff behind (the scenes).”

Mercer said she interns with MOV2GO, student operated, publicly funded, community access programming for the Mid-Ohio Valley.

She said she is the producer and director of their high school run show, called “High School Football Weekly.”

“We go to football games around the Mid-Ohio Valley, we go as far as to Sheridan and then we go out to South Charleston,” she said. “And we just run a four-hour show about football. It’s crazy.”

Mercer said every Friday night during football season they travel to different games. She said they work in a high-tech trailer that has “really nice equipment.”

She said it is a high-school-ran program, with the exception of President and CEO Jeff Totten and a past graduate of the program.

“We just run it, we have people who run camera, we’ve got audio, we have all of the equipment needed and we produce and run the show all by ourselves with help from him (Totten)…”

Mercer said she thought she was going to be a kindergarten teacher before she found the program.

“And then I was like, this is the program I want to do. I like running the equipment while you’re live,” she said. “Like if you mess up, you mess up. There is no going back, there is no ‘I’ll just edit it later.’ It’s out there. They’ve already seen it like five seconds after you did it. And I just like the high you get from just running through it completely and there was no mess ups, and everybody did perfect.”

Mercer said Totten treats the students like they’re adults.

“His whole goal is to have it completely run by high school students,” she said. “It’s an experience, but we all have a good time.”

She said his motto is ‘I’ll give you the 6 feet of rope and I’ll save you when you start to hang yourself, but I want you to learn.’

Mercer said her dream job is to become a producer on a show.

“My goal is to definitely be a producer of a live show of some sort, because that’s me. That’s my personality,” she said. “I’m very take charge, let’s get this done the right way.”

She said she knows that if she joins a show, that she’ll have to start at the bottom and work her way up. She said on her current show she knows how to run all of the equipment, which is why she gets to be the producer and the director.

Mercer volunteers at the Parkersburg Boys and Girls Club. Her mother, Beth Mercer, is the unit director at the club. She said she started going to work with her mom in the summer, because she wanted something to do. She said she volunteers as a junior staff member.

“And I like it. It’s a good community,” she said. “I get along with a lot of the kids here. It’s nice to have somewhere to go.”

Mercer said she has also volunteered with the Belpre Safety Town program every summer since she was in seventh grade. She said they teach kids going into kindergarten how to cross the street, how to act around farm equipment, how to interact with students in a class room setting, pool safety, fire safety and anything else important they might need to know.

“It’s really fun,” she said. “I like working with kids.”

In her spare time, Mercer enjoys reading, drawing, and taking care of her three cats and four ferrets.

James Dobbs can be reached at jdobbs@newsandsentinel.com

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