Handling media relations for the University of Maine is a lot like broadcasting a hockey game. The puck can take strange bounces; you always have to be on your toes. Fortunately, Joe Carr, director of university relations, is adept at expecting the unexpected—a skill he honed doing hockey play-by-play as the Black Bears rose to national prominence.
Carr heads a staff of 14 whose job it is to tell the university’s story to prospective students, parents, alumni, policy makers, and the people of Maine. They produce UMaine Today magazine, field media inquiries, develop promotional material, and handle internal university communications and procedures for emergencies. It’s a multi-faceted job that changes as fast as the fickle Maine weather.
“It’s certainly a dynamic atmosphere, which makes it both challenging and fun,” he says. “We can come to work every day knowing that something interesting will be happening. As a communications professional, that’s what you want, to always have a story to tell.”
Carr grew up in Hermon and now calls Brewer home. He earned a bachelor’s degree in political science from Providence College and a master’s in mass communication from Emerson College in Boston, before returning to Maine to take a job at “the closest TV station in the world to where I grew up.” At that time, WABI-TV owned an affiliated radio station, where Carr was apprenticed to Gary Thorne, who did the play-by-play for UMaine hockey games.
“I am a hockey fan, although I can’t stand up on skates myself,” Carr says. “I became connected to college hockey when I was a student working at the student radio station at Providence and got an opportunity to do hockey play-by-play there as a junior and senior. [WABI management] knew that Gary was going places, and so they created a situation where I would work with him for a couple of years at home games. He would handle the play-by-play, but I would take care of the intermissions, etc.”
Talk about being in the right place at the right time. “At the end of the 1987 season, when Gary left to go to spring training with the New York Mets, the job became mine. The first Black Bear hockey game that I broadcast on my own was also the first NCAA playoff game Maine had ever played in. Gary took them all the way through the regular season and the Hockey East playoffs, but had to leave for spring training just before Maine had finally reached national tournament play.”
Carr continued to broadcast Maine hockey games through the glory years, including the school’s first national championship in 1992–93. “I tell people proudly I saw every game Paul Kariya played in a Maine uniform,” he says. “It was a thrill to be around that group day in and day out.”
Carr still does play-by-play on WABI-TV for about 10 home games each season. But his full-time job keeps him more than busy. The university has a new president, Dr. Paul Ferguson, with whom he meets frequently. “Our role involves communicating the university’s priorities, and those are set by the university leadership,” he says.
Changes in technology have brought changes in routine. “When I first started here, we were developing news releases, printing them, and sending them off in the mail at the end of the day hoping something good would happen,” he says. “Today, that news release will go out by email or up on a number of websites. To a large extent, our news is delivered to some of our audiences unfiltered.”
That’s important in emergencies, which Carr and his colleagues must convey to the university population. “We want to make it clear very quickly that there is an issue, and that if you’re on campus, you need to put yourself in a safe environment. We use a number of functions to accomplish that, including text messaging, website updates, a series of audible sirens, email, Facebook, Twitter, and other tools at our disposal. We’ve created a system to execute that whole array of communications in under five minutes. We practice it. We’ve only used the whole system one time, when there was a bank robbery and the report was that the robber was armed and his whereabouts were unknown. Fortunately, there was no imminent threat, but the
system worked well.”
