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NEWS MEDIA MAY be global, but newsgathering remains very much local, as a group of USC journalism graduate students learned last summer. The students traveled to South Africa on six-week reporting internships arranged by USC’s Annenberg School for Communication.
Before leaving, they completed a course on South African history, culture and journalism taught by Loren Ghiglione, director of Annenberg’s journalism school. The students learned a bit of Xhosa and Afrikaans, South Africa’s most important languages after English. They also studied the customs and the history of the region’s ethnic groups. Former Los Angeles Times editor Michael Parks, CNN correspondent Charlayne Hunter-Gault, former New York Times correspondent Ken Noble and South African newspaper editor Mansoor Jaffer also contributed to the course.
Then the students headed for Cape Town to take up their reporting assignments at the Cape Argus and Cape Times newspapers. Collectively, the six participating students published 75 articles, “which isn’t bad, since they had only three and a half weeks of actual writing time,” says Ghiglione.
In addition to spending about a month writing breaking news and feature articles, the students also spent about two weeks visiting significant sites – such as a platinum mine where 45 percent of the workers are HIV positive, an archaeological dig, a national game preserve and the infamous slums of Soweto, located outside Johannesburg.
“The South Africa program encourages students – especially American students, who can be a bit provincial – to understand and report the world,” says Ghiglione. “The challenge is to get them to overcome biases and blind spots, to think in different ways than they would have if they had stayed here in their safe, comfortable world.”
A sampling of the 75 clips generated by USC journalism students during last summer’s six-week South African internship program. Behind USC School of Journalism director Loren Ghiglione, students Eugene Tong, Shefali Srinivas, Julia Thornton and Victoria Cavaliere display some of their best efforts, which garnered page-one placements.
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Print journalism student Eugene Tong appreciated the chance to find out what it’s like to be a foreign correspondent. “It was an opportunity that is unavailable anywhere else or in any other program I’ve come across,” he says.
“Probably one of the biggest stories I worked on was a story about a fire that took the life of a mother and her month-old baby in one of the shanty townships in Cape Town,” says Tong, who will graduate with an M.A. in May. “I happened to speak with the husband of the deceased. He could barely talk. I had never dealt with that before. It was a powerful experience.”
Julia Thornton, who graduated with a master’s in international journalism in December, was struck by the media bias, sensationalism and sloppy reporting rampant in the South African press. “When you see how flawed the system there is, you begin to develop a stronger appreciation for how the press operates in the States,” she says.
One of her most powerful stories came after overhearing a group of men talking about their desire to have sex with young girls. It prompted Thornton to write a column about the rape crisis in South Africa.
“The interesting thing is that the group of men consisted of both blacks and whites,” she wrote. “When the two men high-fived each other, it was a black hand meeting a white one – solidarity at the expense of little girls.”
Another student, Sarah Brown, is amazed at how her South Africa internship has opened doors. “I have lost count of the number of people who have looked at my résumé and been amazed at the things I have done,” she says. A native of England, she has accepted a job as an international reporter for a financial magazine in London.
THE SOUTH AFRICA program is only the beginning. This fall, the faculty voted to recommend to the university that every grad student in the School of Journalism, including those in the public relations sequence, have a work experience abroad.
“As far as I know, ours is the only journalism program in the country that will have this requirement,” Ghiglione says.
The 36 students entering the journalism program have the choice of going to London, South Africa, Mexico or Hong Kong as project sites for next summer.
WRITE ABOUT CIVIL RIGHTS
Putting Social Justice on Deadline
Montiel
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IN OCTOBER, the USC Annenberg School for Communication unveiled a new center aimed at establishing a “social justice” beat in American newsrooms and moving coverage of race, gender and class issues into journalism’s mainstream.
The newly created Institute for Justice and Journalism, organizers say, will help reporters cover communities affected by discrimination, poverty and inequity.
“Race and class – as issues that impact social justice – are inextricably a part of the American canvas,” says Steve Montiel, the institute’s newly appointed executive director and past president of the Oakland, Calif.-based Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education.
“For instance, the Los Angeles Police Department’s Rampart scandal is more than a story of police corruption,” Montiel says. “It is also a story about race, class, gender and geography.”
The institute aims to “reshape journalists’ perceptions of what is newsworthy,” says School of Journalism director Loren Ghiglione. “It won’t be based on ‘political correctness’ from either end of the political spectrum.”
It’s a matter of telling stories as completely as possible, adds Montiel. “We want to take civil justice out of the closet and free it from being ‘ghettoized’ within the newsroom.”
The Institute for Justice and Journalism will hold a three-day conference in late spring, bringing together leading thinkers, journalism experts, social activists and scholars on issues of social justice. This group will lay the institute’s conceptual framework, mission and scope of activities. Residential fellowships comparable to Harvard’s Nieman Fellows program will be available the following year, and plans call for mini-fellowships to assist working journalists and scholars interested in social justice and journalism. Workshops and seminars will begin in 2002. The institute is funded by a $425,000 Ford Foundation grant.
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Ghouls-Dot-Com
Here’s a spooky thought: Halloween, that quaint quasi-pagan rite, is going digital. Last October, the Web was crawling with thousands of Halloween sites hawking everything from realistic corpses to mechanical cobweb makers, not to mention a frightful array of costumes and decorations. You could even bulk-order fresh pumpkins. The virtual trick-or-treat can’t be far behind. When you think about it, says sociologist Barry Glassner, that’s as it should be.
“The Halloween tradition that goes back to childhood is about fast, easy acquisitions,” Glassner told USA Today. “Internet retailing, done well, is also about fast, easy acquisitions.”
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