Beni Enas (right) working with a student.
Honoring some stellar school teachers may result in an NIU teacher being honored herself.
Beni Enas, the general manager for Northern Television Center and teacher of some NIU broadcasting courses, has been nominated for a local Emmy Award from the Chicago/Midwest Chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. She was nominated for Outstanding Achievement in Public Affairs/Current Affairs Programming in 2016-2017.
The Emmy winners will be announced Dec. 2, at the Swissotel in Chicago.
The nomination is based on how Enas produced the Golden Apple Awards ceremony and broadcast in May 2016 for Chicago public television station WTTW Channel 11, where she then worked.
The Golden Apple Foundation is a not-for-profit organization that works to inspire, develop and support teacher and school leader excellence in Illinois, especially in schools-of-need. WTTW’s hour-long “Golden Apple Awards” show profiled 10 teachers whom the foundation had chosen to receive that year’s Golden Apple Awards for Excellence in Teaching and Leadership, plus one school principal who had been selected for the foundation’s Stanley C. Golder Leadership Award.
Enas, 47, said she was nominated for Emmys in the same category twice before without winning. “But I’m hoping this is the one,” she said, “because this is the project I feel most akin to. I put my heart and soul into this. And now that I’m a teacher myself, I feel especially passionate about the topic.
“We followed each of the honorees around for a day in their classrooms, and then we brought them into the WTTW studios to receive their Golden Apple Awards,” she added.
Enas said she grew up in the Bronx borough of New York City and earned her bachelor’s degree at the State University of New York College at Buffalo, N.Y. She later added a master’s degree in education from North Central College in Naperville. She worked for CNN, ABC Channel 7 Chicago, Channel One in Los Angeles, News 12 Long Island and other TV news organizations before being hired by WTTW in 2011.
Before coming to NIU in August 2016, she also taught full-time at Columbia College in downtown Chicago and part-time at the College of DuPage in Glen Ellyn.
At WTTW she was a line producer for “Chicago Tonight,” a daily hour-long news and public affairs show. Her previous two Emmy nominations were for producing “Chicago Tonight.”
At the Northern Television Center (known to its personnel as “the NTC”), Enas and two other staff members supervise as students from journalism, communications and meteorology classes produce the half-hour weekly show “NTC News Tonight.” The show is cablecast several times each week, starting at 5 p.m. Thursday, on DeKalb Cable Channel 14. It is also available on demand on YouTube.
Enas also teaches NIU courses in broadcast newswriting and TV line producing.
“I teach aspiring young journalists of today who will hopefully become the reporters, anchors, producers, editors, directors and news people of tomorrow,” Enas said.
- The “Golden Apple Awards 2016” show can be seen online at https://video.wttw.com/video/2365767972/.
- NTC News can be seen on online at https://www.youtube.com/user/NTCNIU.
- NTC’s Top Shelf Sports can be seen at https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=top+shelf+sports+niu.
