Staff
Stan Sollars
Senior Producer, Morning Edition host
Stan Sollars joined IPR and Ball State’s Telecommunications (TCOM) faculty in 1992. It’s all the result of his parents giving him a G.E. portable tape recorder for Christmas when he was 10. He started recording comedy skits, documentaries (with research via his World Book Encyclopedias), and interview shows featuring his neighbors and schoolmates. His media career officially began at age 13 when he wrote and produced educational radio programs for his high school’s FM station (WDHS at Wes-Del), and was a student correspondent for the Muncie Evening Press. While in college, he was a news and feature “stringer” for WIBC and WNAP in Indianapolis under the guidance of legendary news director Fred Heckman.
After earning B.S. and M.A. degrees in journalism (BSU, ’78 & ’80), he narrated documentaries for McGraw-Hill Broadcasting and produced more than 250 episodes of the Indiana history radio series, The 19th State. The series won numerous regional and national awards and has episodes residing in New York’s Museum of Television and Radio. Between 1994 and 2000 he produced and engineered 75 hours of network programming worldwide on the series “Rock and Roll America” for National Public Radio (NPR) and Indiana Public Radio.
Today, he teaches TCOM’s beginning and advanced digital audio classes. He covers recording and mixing audio from mono to stereo to 5.1 surround sound for music, broadcasting and cinema. Since the summer of 1995 Stan has anchored and edited Indiana Public Radio’s Morning Edition newscasts. His newscasts have won 30 Best Newscast awards from the Indiana Associated Press (AP), the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) and the Radio and Television News Directors Association (RTNDA). Stan’s newscasts have twice won the prestigious Edward R. Murrow Award from RTNDA. He is also a member of the IPR news team that won Edward R. Murrow Awards from RTNDA for overall excellence in 1999, 2000 and 2001.
Stan has also achieved recognition from picture radio. He has received two Emmy nominations from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (NATAS) Lower Great Lakes chapter. One was for TV program audio design. The second was for Technical Achievement for leading the design team of Ball State TCOM’s production facilities in the David Letterman Communication and Media Building. The second nomination garnered Stan an Emmy statuette as the TCOM facilities won the Technical Achievement Emmy in September 2009.
He has also engineered a number of compact discs, including “Piano Themes from the Silent Screen” and a modern piano DVD soundtrack and CD for the 1934 Chinese silent film “The Goddess,” both for the San Francisco Silent Film Festival. “The Goddess” DVD has received a number of positive reviews for its composer and pianist Kevin Purrone, as well as for Stan’s audio work. Additionally, Stan is an associate member of the Cinema Audio Society of Burbank, CA. He is one of only three CAS members in Indiana, and 600 members internationally.
“I love it here at Ball State,” Stan says. “I get to teach, write, perform, produce, edit, mix, and design the studios. It’s not work; it’s a privilege. It feels more like a ‘they-let-me-do-all-of-this’ situation, rather than a job.”