UNMC to be featured Friday on CBS Evening News

CBS news correspondent Steve Hartman, right, and his videographer, Bob Caccamise, use a utility cart to wheel their camera down a hall in the Eppley Cancer Institute to show how UNMC Artist in Residence Mark Gilbert’s studio is sandwiched between cancer research laboratories.

Steve Hartman is a great storyteller.

Each week, he scours the country looking for unique stories on fascinating people for his weekly “Assignment America” segment on the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric.

This week, Hartman came to Omaha to put together a video masterpiece on Mark Gilbert, UNMC’s artist in residence who has been involved in two pioneering efforts — teaching medical students how to improve their observation skills and painting a series of portraits of patients and their caregivers.

The segment will air Friday on the CBS Evening News, which airs locally from 5:30 to 6 p.m. on KMTV (Channel 3).

A multiple Emmy Award winner, Hartman’s recent itinerary included stops in Kalamazoo, Mich., where he told the story of a blind barber, and Atlanta, where he shared the story of an 8-year-old autistic boy who comes out of his shell when he sings the national anthem.

Set your TiVos, VCRs and DVRs Steve Hartman’s story on UNMC Artist in Residence Mark Gilbert will air at the tail end of Friday’s 5:30 p.m. broadcast of the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric. Also Friday, UNMC Today will feature a video interview of Hartman about his work and why he was interested in doing a story on Gilbert.

His weekly segments always air on Fridays at the end of the newscast. The uplifting segments put a happy face on the close of the work week.

Typically, Hartman lets viewers decide where he goes and what he covers. Each week, he reveals three story pitches, and then viewers log on to CBSNews.com to vote for their favorite. Hartman takes the winning pitch and turns it into a story for the following Friday’s newscast.

His visit to UNMC came about as a result of a story that aired locally on WOWT, Channel 6, on Jan. 27. The story featured Gilbert drawing a portrait of Daisy Friedman, a 5-year-old Omaha girl who received a liver/small bowel transplant at The Nebraska Medical Center.

Friedman and her mother, Joey Hoffman, were interviewed for the WOWT segment. Hoffman’s sister-in-law saw the story and sent it to one of her close friends who works in the CBS newsroom in New York. From there, the story filtered its way over to Hartman’s desk.

Daisy’s portrait is one of many portraits of patients and caregivers that Gilbert has drawn during the past year at UNMC. He will select approximately 50 pieces from his entire collection for an exhibition at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha. The exhibition, called “Portraits of Care,” will start Dec. 12, 2008 and run for approximately three months.

Hartman and his videographer, Bob Caccamise, arrived in Omaha on Monday afternoon and left about 24 hours later. During their stay, they shot enough video to fill six 30-minute tapes.

Their creativity knows no bounds. They meticulously set up their shots for each of their interviews. They were struck by the fact that Gilbert’s art studio is a converted cancer research laboratory on the fourth floor of the Eppley Cancer Institute. His studio is surrounded by cancer research labs.

To capture this unusual location, Caccamise put his video camera on a cart he borrowed from one of the nearby cancer research labs. With the camera rolling, Hartman then pushed the camera down the hallway allowing viewers to get the feeling of walking down the hall and seeing Gilbert’s studio sandwiched between cancer research labs.

In addition to Gilbert and Hoffman, others interviewed included:

• William Lydiatt, M.D., otolaryngology/head and neck surgery, who along with Virginia Aita, Ph.D., a medical ethicist in the College of Public Health, were responsible for recruiting Gilbert to UNMC;
  
• Katie Lazure, a fourth-year medical student who went through the class teaching observation skills;
  
• Glenna Oltman, a Louisville, Neb., woman, who was treated by Dr. Lydiatt for cancer in her lower jaw and was one of the patients whose portrait was done by Gilbert.

After Hartman returns from an assignment, he does his own editing at his home in Catskill, N.Y., then heads to New York City on Friday to deliver his segment on the set with Katie Couric. He will boil the 180-minutes of video shot at UNMC down to a tidy 2 minute, 20 second package.

Caccamise and Hartman first became partners at WABC-TV in New York City. Each day, they would go out on the streets of New York and find a human interest story. The segment was called “Life around Here with Steve Hartman.” Their first segment dealt with a homeless person who collected hubcaps.

CBS news correspondent Steve Hartman, right, with UNMC artist in residence Mark Gilbert, left, and Joey Hoffman, mother of Daisy Friedman, a 5-year-old girl whose image is portrayed in the background. Friedman underwent a liver/small bowel transplant at The Nebraska Medical Center.

Hartman is well known for his award-winning feature series, “Everybody Has a Story,” in which he would toss a dart at a map of the United States and then randomly select an interview subject from the local phone book. The series debuted in 1998 and Hartman produced more than 100 such pieces.

A native of Toledo, Ohio, Hartman held television reporting posts in Toledo, Minneapolis, New York City and Los Angeles before joining CBS as a news correspondent in 1998.

Among his assignments with CBS, Hartman served as a correspondent on “60 Minutes Wednesday” — a news magazine patterned after “60 Minutes.” Hartman provided a weekly commentary for the program, similar to what Andy Rooney does on “60 Minutes.”

Hartman will return to Omaha on April 30 as one of the featured speakers in the Omaha Town Hall Lecture Series at the Joslyn Art Museum. For more information on this lecture series, go to http://www.omahatownhall.com/.

Click here to view some of Hartman’s previous stories on “Assignment America.”