International Reporting: A Career-Bender For Journalists
One premise of ieiMedia is that doing journalism in a foreign setting raises the student’s learning experience by a quantum leap.
This happens to professional journalists as well.
Last week, my journalism department at Washington & Lee hosted a three-day visit from Jackie Spinner, who is one of the brave war correspondents for conflicts in the Middle East. She had just returned from the West Bank on assignment from Foreign Affairs and the Christian Science Monitor. Two years ago, she was a Fulbright Scholar in Oman, where she started one university’s first independent student newspaper. She wrote Tell Them I Didn’t Cry, a memoir about her three years covering the height of the war in Iraq for the Washington Post. She’s 41,but looks about 28, especially in pictures showing her in a bullet-proof “Press” vest.
How she got to be a war correspondent was a fluke. At the Post, fresh out of college, she worked her way up from intern to suburban reporter to business reporter. As a business reporter, she got a big assignment: find out if Vice President Dick Cheney’s former job running Halliburton had anything to do with Halliburton’s huge contract to rebuilt post-Saddam Iraq. She realized that she needed to follow that story to Iraq, but the Post wouldn’t send her. One day she got a tip through a friend: a female soldier in Baghdad was in trouble doing a job the Army didn’t even train her for, guarding detainees at a former dungeon of torture called Abu Ghraib. She told her editors, hey, there might be a story there. They said forget it, stick with Halliburton and stay in the States. But about a month later, word on the wire was that CBS had photos of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. The Post called Jackie in Texas, and quickly, finally, sent her to Iraq. Right after covering Abu Ghraib, she covered the horrific Battle of Fallujah.
When you survive the first few weeks of covering a war, she says, you learn what it takes to survive and how to work around bullets, bombs and death to find the good stories. You get good at it, but at a cost – it’s hard to come back to the newsroom and do anything else. Fortunately, she’s found a balance. She started an international literacy program based in Belize. She co-curated a multi-media exhibit of news and military war photos currently touring the country called “Conflict Zone.” She is currently a journalism professor at Columbia College in Chicago, but continues covering the Middle East when she’s not teaching.
Studying journalism in Urbino, Istanbul, or Perpignan, of course, is exciting for other reasons. It’s not life-threatening. But it allows students to dip a toe into the kind of career-bending, mind-altering experience reporters get when an assignment takes them into a distant, different land.
Sharing a few meals with Jackie Spinner, and having her talk to my Intro News Writing class, I see a pattern in the way some reporters break out into international journalism. The Fishback Visiting Writers program, which brought her here, has brought other distinguished journalists, about one a year: E.J. Dionne, Steve Coll, Robert Kaplan, and Jane Mayer, among others. Kaplan and Mayer, as I recall their visits, both told similar stories of breaking into international reporting on a fluke, or a lark. Kaplan quit a small newspaper because of a big dream – moving to Europe to try to freelance for U.S. publications. It took him a year before his impoverished stringing turned into a career that led to his being, today, one of the most authoritative observers of foreign affairs, with books and magazine articles that surprise and shape policy. Jane Mayer, as a young Yalie, was the TV critic for the Washington Post. In late October, 1983, she flew to the Middle East (where the conflict in Lebanon was a minor skirmish compared to later wars) to profile a top TV cameraman. While she was there, a suicide truck-bomber drove into the Marine compound and killed 230 U.S. Marines. She followed the news, not just the feature she was writing about a cameraman. Al Hunt, at the Wall Street Journal bureau in D.C., was so impressed, he hired her. Eventually, her sharp feature writing and her ability to explain the shadowy side of power brought her to the New Yorker, where her writing on the Bush Administration’s War on Terrorism (her book on this is called The Dark Side) and right-wing political sugar daddies has altered the public discussion, as they say.
Urbino Alum Interns At Times-Picayune
Sydni Dunn, Urbino magazine program alumna and journalism senior at Louisiana State University, has landed a meaty internship at New Orleans’s Times-Picayune. (That well-respected paper is also home to Urbino multimedia instructor Bob Marshall.) Sydni’s profile for Urbino Now of the town’s last traditional barber, called “Snips of History,” was honored as best feature at the end of the 2011 program. Here’s Sydni’s dispatch:
Sydni Dunn
I participated in ieiMedia’s magazine program in Urbino, Italy, during the summer of 2011. While in Urbino, I was able to immerse myself in the culture of the Le Marche region, explore my new surroundings and, best of all, write about it. I occasionally flip through Urbino Now, the magazine we created, and attempt to relive that summer through my classmates’ prose and photos. It works every time.
And though I am back at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, I cherish every moment I spent in Urbino with ieiMedia and continue to apply what I learned to my current journalism adventures.
I am now a senior at LSU studying print journalism, international studies and Italian. I am a staff writer for the University’s quarterly magazine Legacy; a freelance writer for the Baton Rouge newspaper The Advocate; a copy editor and Special Reports Chair for the University’s newspaper The Daily Reveille; and the City Desk news intern at The Times-Picayune in New Orleans.
I attribute my ability to work at such a variety of publications to ieiMedia and the lessons it taught me in being adaptable. Finding story ideas in a foreign place, conducting interviews alongside a translator and creating a travel magazine to capture the essence of Le Marche was such an invaluable experience. I now know that if I can thrive as a journalist in another country, there is no limit to what I can do in Louisiana.
For an aspiring international journalist, ieiMedia was the perfect gateway to explore my interest and help reinforce what I want to do with the rest of my life.
Urbino Under Six Feet of Snow
Urbino in the snow. Photo by Filippo Biagianti.
Urbino alums: Do you remember how hard it was to walk up steep Via Raffaello last summer, especially on a hot afternoon?
Well, just think what it’s like now, with the town covered in five or six feet of snow.
The terrible winter weather in Europe has hit Urbino particularly hard, as you can see in this CNN iReport from resident Cheryl Ferguson. The town is in a state of emergency.
JMU student Kristina Elliott, who took the multimedia course in 2011, shared this photo by resident Filippo Biagianti. For sunnier shots, check out Pesaro resident Edoardo Serretti’s flickr set called “Urbino – Neve 2012.”
(Thanks for the tip, Sunny Thao.)
Social Media: Career Path or Dead End?
A recent post on Mediabistro’s 10,000 Words blog (Should Social Media Be Taught in Journalism or Business School?) got me thinking about social media as a career for young journalists.
And then I read Mandy Jenkins’s post about why she left her job as HuffPo’s Social News Editor. Seems “social media editor” could be more of a dead-end job than a career path.
At some news organizations, the social media editor role is one based largely in strategy, product development, evangelization and training. In other cases, the “social media editor” is manually running a newsroom’s branded social media accounts alone or as part of a small team, in a role I fondly refer to as “The Twitter Monkey”….
The truth is, I’ve rarely had time in the past four years to actually step back and look at the big picture of what I’ve been doing. You have to be able to study, research and read to be able to create and evolve social strategy. You need to have time to experiment with new tools and practices and to work on new products to engage readers. You have to be available to help others with their own social media dilemmas. All of that is very difficult to do when you’re shoveling coal to power the Twitter Machine 24/7.
Jenkins isn’t a 20-something just starting out in journalism. She’s an experienced editor and reporter who has worked at places like the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and the Cincinnati Enquirer. She moved into social media as a natural evolution in her career. And then it looked like there was no next step.
It used to be you could start as a copyeditor, reporter or web producer and eventually (with good work) move up to be a mid-level editor, then an editor, then a director and so on. There was a system. The social media specialist, as a fairly new role, often isn’t in that system (from my anecdotal evidence-gathering). Their skills, while useful for their purposes, may not be likely to translate into larger digital roles in the minds of top level managers.
I can’t tell you how many times in my career I’ve expressed interest in jobs outside of social media – in content editing, digital management, news editor-type jobs, and been rebuffed with “but your experience seems to be in social media”. Lucky for me, I had a career before social media – and I’ve managed to do enough outside of my Twitter monkeying to keep those skills sharp.
Long story short, I was afraid I would be forever branded a “Social Media Person” – and then wouldn’t even be able to be hired for those existing social media positions, anyway.
So Jenkins is returning to her “local journalism roots” with Digital First Media, owner of local-news outlets across the country.
Jenkins managed to escape the Twitter Monkey treadmill for something with more of a future. Social media skill is a must-have for newly minted journalists. But let’s make sure they cultivate other abilities (such as these basics from my alma mater) so they can keep their options open.
(Be sure to read Jenkins’s full post, as well as the thoughtful comments.)
Urbino Alumna at National Geographic
We’re so happy and proud when one of our former students leaves the nest–and lands a great journalism job. Here’s a dispatch from Samantha Blee, who was part of our magazine project in Urbino. Congratulations, Samantha!
In the summer of 2010, I participated in ieiMedia’s magazine program in Urbino, Italy. Today, the little pleasures of living in Urbino are still fresh in my memory. The stunning views of the surrounding countryside when looking over the city’s medieval walls. The taste of fresh gelato consumed in the main piazza. The passionate chatter of young Italian boys as they cheered for their team in the FIFA World Cup. If I close my eyes, I might as well be walking past the magnificent Palazzo Ducale with my friends from the program.
The lessons learned while studying journalism in a foreign country are still paying off. Shortly after returning to the United States, I started a Master’s program in Journalism and Public Affairs in Washington, D.C., the city where I hoped to some day pursue a career at National Geographic. Luckily for me, when I walked into National Geographic’s headquarters that following fall for an internship interview, I had ieiMedia on my resume and a copy of our publication, Urbino Now, in hand.
IeiMedia gave me something that no normal classroom setting could provide: independence. Creating a magazine in another country is an invaluable experience. Not only are you sharpening basic journalistic skills, but you’re doing it completely out of your comfort zone. Working with translators becomes a big part of your writing process. Topics you’re covering might not even exist in America (The hidden caves of Camerano? The birthplace of Gioachino Rossini?). By the end of your time abroad, you get the sense that if you can do solid work here, you can do it anywhere, and that confidence becomes an important asset.
I spoke of these experiences in my interview, and was soon hired for my dream internship. Now I’m working full time with National Geographic Digital Media, and I fully believe that my time in Urbino helped me get to where I am today. The skills taught by ieiMedia are valuable in several fields; having a strong background in writing, photography, editing, design, planning, and organization is something that sets you apart from your peers. I still look back fondly on my experiences in Urbino, and will always be thankful for everything I gained through the program!
Why Istanbul (Not Constantinople)?
The "Istanbul song" softened Western indignation over the Muslimization of the city's name.
In 1930, Turkish leader Mustafa Kemal Ataturk announced that Turkey’s principal city would be known only by its Muslim name, Istanbul. Constantinople, the Greek name in use since 330 AD, would no longer be recognized. Letters addressed “Constantinople” would be returned! That caused a stir.
But a silly swing song written in Turkey’s defense took the edge off Western pique. “They Might be Giants (Istanbul Not Constantinople)” later morphed into a cult hit for the Canadian group The Four Lads, and into Istanbul’s best-ever piece of global PR. The song still campily features in anglophone cartoons and movies.
It riffs on Irving Berlin’s “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” popularized by Fred Astaire during the Great Depression.
Here’s a ska version, performed in Istanbul in 2010.
If there’s a Turkish version, I couldn’t find it. Undergraduate journalism students in ieiMedia’s Istanbul Project could pick up the story, for our summer 2012 web documentary chronicling Istanbul’s cosmopolitan heritage. What do Turks think of the song? I put the question to my Turkish husband. Never heard of it, he said.
Italian Journalism
From time to time, I may share information about Italy or Urbino. In this post, I have information about journalists and journalism in Italy, as well an important book on the Italian character known as The Italians.
You may be interested in reading about Luigi Barzini, Sr. and his son Luigi Barzini, Jr.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luigi_Barzini,_Sr.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luigi_Barzini,_Jr.
Luigi Barzini, Jr. wrote a book in 1964 called The Italians. This book is considered a classic and a help in understanding Italian life and culture even today.
http://www.amazon.com/Italians-Luigi-Barzini/dp/0684825007/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1327020347&sr=8-1
Finally, one of the most important newspapers in Italy is known as Corriere della Sera which translates to “The Evening Courier.” There is an English version online that contains some of the stories. You might want to read about the Italian cruise ship disaster and pay special attention to how the stories are different from what you might see in the U.S.
http://www.corriere.it/english/
I hope you find these things interesting. Happy reading! Ciao!
Istanbul Project Student a Hearst Multimedia Award Finalist
A multimedia story by Kat Russell, a student in the summer 2011 Istanbul Project, has been named a finalist in the prestigious annual Hearst Journalism Multimedia Awards.
Working with Prof. Brent Foster, Russell profiled Janset Karavan, an Istanbul writer and mime. Their interviews were conducted in Turkish, with Bahçeşehir University student Bürde Özçakır translating.
Award finalist Kat Russell
Russell, an undergraduate at California State University at Northridge, produced the story while on assignment for The Istanbul Project, a joint undergraduate foreign reporting program of ieiMedia and San Francisco State University. Istanbul’s Bahçeşehir University hosts the three-credit program each summer.
Students practice reporting and writing about another culture, while learning to shoot photos and video, and to work with interpreters. Their stories are considered for publication in a digital magazine, and book.
The annual Hearst Journalism Awards Program is conducted under the auspices of the Association of Schools of Journalism and Mass Communication, and funded by the William Randolph Hearst Foundation. The program’s mission is to support excellence in journalism and journalism education at U.S. colleges and universities.
Discovering Multiculti Istanbul
A touch of French culture near Istanbul's French Street.
The feisty Turkish republic that emerged from the Ottoman Empire in 1923 pledged to be a “Turkey for the Turks.” Yet as a foreigner visiting Istanbul, you’re unlikely to experience a monoethnic city.
France and Turkey may right now be blasting each other over whether the tragic expulsions and deaths of more than a million Armenians from the Ottoman Empire in 1915 constitute a “genocide,” but Turkish society fell in love with French culture a long time ago. The 19th century intelligentsia studied French literature, and Istanbul (then called Constantinople) happily promoted itself as the “Paris of the East.” A few years ago, in homage to binational amour, Istanbul built a French Street, decorating it with antique gas and coal-powered street lamps imported from Paris, the better to mimic Montmartre.
Students who join the ieiMedia study abroad program in the summer of 2012 will be covering this love-hate story of Franco-Turkish relations as we document Istanbul’s cosmopolitan heritage. (See the video below for a preview.)
Each student will be invited explore the ties between Istanbul and a country, ethnic group or resident minority. Then we’ll weave these stories into a web documentary incorporating student writing, photography and video. The best work will be published in a book.
As the wealthy capital of a multinational empire, Istanbul attracted ambitious people from around the world: Greek entrepreneurs and Armenian tradesmen; Sephardic Jews fleeing the Spanish Inquisition; Albanian silversmiths who produced the finest filigree. Poles, Bosnians, Circassians, Georgians, Egyptians, Ethiopians, and Kurds all left their mark. So did British imperialists, Genoese bankers, German advisers and American missionaries, who established schools, churches and hospitals, some still operating today.
In its variety of neighborhoods, architecture, cuisine, books, views, music and dress, Istanbul still feels bound to that ancient cosmopolitanism. That’s probably why the city reminds me much more of my hometown, New York, than of some unicultural berg.
Here’s to our adventure.
Urbino Project 2011 Website Wins EPPY Award
Editor and Publisher announced EPPY Award winners at 1:30 today. Our Urbino 2011 website was a finalist. Turns out we won! The site was the top site in the category Best College/University Website: Journalistic or Documentary Report.
The EPPY™ Awards are one of the nation’s most prized and long-running honors for online content and recognize the best media-affiliated websites across 43 diverse categories.
See the complete list of winners at:
http://www.eppyawards.com/Content/Past_2011_Winners-28-.aspx
ieiMedia’s website was created in partnership with Iowa State University and James Madison University.
This a true team award combining the work of students and faculty. Congratulations again to all the students and faculty who worked on the site, including students Renee Anderson, Abigail Barefoot, Grant Bell, Kailah Bharath, Robert Boag, Genevieve Bryan, Jared Carpenter, Sarah Cumming, Kerri DeVries, Kristina Elliott, Kenneth Foo, Dorian Geiger, Olivia Gordon, Ola Mazzuca, Caroline McGraw, Mojan Nourbakhsh, Steve Odorczyk, Addie Olson, Cara Prodanovich, Jennifer Stafford, Martin Steger, Catherine Threlkeld, Cassie Thunhorst, Greg Wahler, Matt Wettengel & Yue Wu and professors Steve Anderson, Dennis Chamberlin, Doug Cumming, Bob Marshall, Ryan Parkhurst & Pawel Wyszomirski.
2012 Locations
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Past Projects
- Urbino Project – 2011
- Urbino Now Magazine – 2011
- Perpignan Project – 2011
- Istanbul Stories – 2011
- Faces of Istanbul (Book) – 2011
- Urbino Now Magazine – 2010
- Perpignan Project – 2010
- Urbino Project – 2009
- Armagh Project – 2009
- Urbino View Magazine – 2009
- Cagli Project – 2008
- Armagh Project – 2007
- Cagli Project – 2007
- Camerano Project – 2006
- Cagli Project – 2006
- Cagli Project – 2005
- Cagli Project – 2004
- Cagli Project – 2003
- Cagli Project – 2002
Students Say...
by Kailah Bharath, Ryerson University, The Urbino Project 2011