International Reporting

Catalog description

International Reporting is an advanced level course in the Bellisario College of Communications designed to give student journalists experience in reporting the news in a foreign country. COMM 402 International Reporting (3) International Reporting is an advanced level course in the College of Communications designed to give student journalists experience in reporting the news in a foreign country. The course is offered in the spring semester only. The key component is a 10-day reporting trip over the spring break to a foreign country. In its first three semesters, the class has gone to Mexico City and Shanghai, and Cape Town, South Africa. The course has been approved as an embedded program by the Office of Global Programs. Admission to the course is highly selective and open only to junior and senior journalism majors. Students must apply for admission and present examples of their work as well as recommendations by a member of the journalism faculty.The aim of this course is to help young journalists acquire the skills they will need to compete in an industry where increasingly the threads of even the most local stories either come from, or lead, overseas. This is not a course aimed at training students to become foreign correspondents. Rather, we hope to prepare students to function in a foreign environment, and to recognize, overcome and ultimately benefit from the linguistic, cultural, economic and legal challenges that working in another country will entail.The course has three segments. In the first half of the semester we study the history, culture, politics and economics of the country to which we are traveling. We also develop and refine our ideas for the stories we will report when we get there. We will also learn about foreign reporting and how it differs from the reporting we have been used to doing here. The second part of the course consists of supervised travel to our target country. Here, we report the stories we have selected, file blogs and video posts to ComMedia, and also meet with local journalists, officials and students of the host country. Depending on the country in which we are working, students also have the opportunity to collaborate, when appropriate, with students from local universities. The final half of the semester is devoted to supervised individual work aimed at turning our reporting into stories suitable for publication or broadcast.Although students are required to acquire a general working knowledge of the country to which we are traveling, and will be tested on it, in the end they will be evaluated almost entirely on their work product. This results-oriented approach has been chosen because it most closely replicates the environment of a professional newsroom.