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The next Walter Cronkite could be living right in Asbury Park — and news program PulseAP is designed to give young city residents a taste of broadcast journalism.

PulseAP is a collection of online news videos about events and businesses in Asbury Park. Veteran film editor Karen Heyson is at the helm, shooting and editing the videos while local teenagers do the reporting.

Heyson aims to teach her young employees job skills that can apply not only to televised news, but to any career through PulseAP. She also hopes to educate young people about their city through the one-year-old program.

“The initial impetus for doing this was giving kids in Asbury Park an opportunity to experience something that they normally would not have,” Heyson said. “I didn’t want to go to some place where there are kids who have tons of money and they have all these programs.”

Heyson lived in New York City for more than 20 years, working as an editor of mostly commercial and corporate video. She moved to Asbury Park’s Sixth Avenue in 2006 when she got an editing job in Sea Bright.

Soon after moving to Asbury Park, she worked with Interfaith Neighbors’ Youth Corps program, which helps young adults gain job skills while receiving a general equivalency diploma [GED]. Her work with Interfaith Neighbors rekindled her passion for working with young people, she said.

“This seemed like a natural fit for me,” she said of starting PulseAP. “And it’s fun because we get to interview people I’d like to talk to anyway.”

Heyson pays each of her young reporters $50 per story, because she wants them to see the experience as a job that has value to her, she said. In the future, she’d like to drum up more funds by providing commercial video services to small businesses, or through corporate sponsorships.

PulseAP has done stories on businesses and trends throughout Asbury Park, including Porta, the pizza restaurant on Kingsley Street. Reporter Ebony Townes, 19, [pictured above, left] said Porta was her favorite assignment so far. At Porta, executive pizzaiola Freddi Vilardi [pictured above, right] taught Townes how to make a pizza on camera.

Townes is a longtime pizza lover, and discovered a new favorite dish on the job at Porta.

“They got me hooked on the octopus salad,” she said.

One of the benefits to PulseAP is teaching the young reporters about what’s going on in areas of their hometown they may not frequent, Heyson said. Many of her reporters live on the west side of town and do not visit the downtown or the beach front often.

“A lot of this is putting a positive spin on this town, bringing the west side and east side together and making everybody feel like, ‘I can go to the boardwalk, I can go to these places on Cookman Avenue,'” Heyson said. “A lot of these kids hardly walk down Cookman Avenue.”

Townes is one of Heyson’s most active reporters. Her first assignment was to cover the Zombie Walk last fall, where a make-up artist gave her a zombie makeover on camera. After that story, Townes couldn’t get enough on-camera reporting.

“I was blown away by everything,” she said. “I was so excited. I just wanted to keep doing more. It’s fun.”

Each online video takes about two weeks to film and edit, Heyson said. Since the Zombie Walk video last spring, Heyson and her reporters have made about 10 more news packages.

Heyson met Townes and many of the student anchors by dropping by The Spot, an arts-centered after-school program at the high school run by the Visiting Nurses Association of Central Jersey.

She tries to match reporters with assignments that interest them. For example, one girl was interested in heavy metal music, so Heyson had her report live on the scene at the Break music contest at the Stone Pony. Another reporter was interested in the occult, so Heyson put her on location at the Paranormal Bookstore on Cookman Avenue, where they filmed a séance.

Recently, the PulseAP crew filmed a story about the city’s community garden, to which Heyson is now adding the finishing touches.

“Each has its own personality,” she said. “I put a lot of time and energy in them.”

For now, PulseAP’s videos can be found at http://www.facebook.com/pulseap. Heyson hopes to have a website up and running by the end of the summer.

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