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Japan: Public relations in Tokyo
Traversing the globe, Winslow Visiting Professor Jim Bright is taking his J460 International Public Relations class to Tokyo for spring break. All 16 are seniors who have taken previous public relations classes and have grade point averages of 3.2 or higher.
Bright said highlights of the Tokyo trip will include meeting Simon Sproule, Nissan’s vice president of communications; dinner with Shuri Fukunaga, at public relations firm Burson-Marsteller; and a sit-down with Christian Caryl, Asian bureau chief of Newsweek, just to name a few.
Bright explained during a phone interview Tuesday that some of the J460 students have yet to travel abroad and not one student has visited Asia, let alone Japan. One of Bright’s students will also experience flying on a plane for the first time. “It’s going to be quite an adventure for them, to say the least,” Bright said.
In preparation for the trip to Tokyo, Bright had his students read “Confucius Lives Next Door: What Living in the East Teaches Us About Living in the West,” by T.R. Reid, the former Tokyo bureau chief for The Washington Post.
Seven different guest speakers, ranging from business journalists to heads of public relation departments, have visited the J460 group. One speaker enlightened the students on cultural differences, Bright explained.
After the trip, each student is responsible for publishing an article with a hometown media outlet about their experience.
Student Lindsy Wise, from North Canton, Ohio, pitched her spring break story to MTV, which is providing her with a video camera, Bright said.
And fellow seniors Amy Goetz and Jill Siegel will be blogging about their experiences in Japan here, at the School of Journalism Web site.
Overall, Bright, who says he is looking forward to looking at Japan through his student’s eyes, hopes the experience will enrich their lives. “It’s a no brainer,” he says of students who study abroad, especially in Asia. “It’s going to give them a competitive advantage to life after IU.”
Europe: The footsteps of Ernie Pyle
Another group of students is crossing the pond with associate professor Owen Johnson’s J460 From London to Paris: In the Footsteps of Ernie Pyle class. In all, 30 students (25 undergraduate and five graduate) and faculty members Jean Person and Tim Street will accompany Johnson on the trip.
As the primary goal of the class is to discover as much as they can about the life and writings of the journalism school’s building’s namesake, the journey to Europe, from a historical sense, will help the students better understand World War II, Johnson said.
“We watched videos about the bombing of London, that Pyle wrote about, and we’ll see those places,” he said. The group also will visit the beaches of Normandy and the city of Paris.
While the students are in Europe, they are responsible for keeping daily journals. After the trip, they will submit to Johnson three columns written in the style of Ernie Pyle.
Graduate student and School of Journalism Web reporter Rosemary Pennington will blog about her trip to Europe on this site as well.
Florida: Learning about convergence
Associate professor David Boeyink, as director of the Ernie Pyle Scholars honors program, is traveling with the 16 journalism honors students to various parts of Florida during spring break. The trip to Florida marks a first for the charter class of Ernie Pyle Scholars, who enrolled in fall 2006. Boeyink’s traveling students now are all sophomores.
In an interview Tuesday afternoon, Boeyink explained the theme for the Ernie Pyle Scholar’s excursion to Florida: convergence.
“We’re going to be looking at media organizations and the ways in which they have tried to deal with this issue of communicating with audiences across different platforms,” he said.
Boeyink recalled a previous trip to Florida’s Sarasota Herald-Tribune, where he met a reporter who, at times, would rewrite her stories three times, one for print, one for the Web and one to for broadcast on cable television. Sometimes, the reporter would even be asked to do her own stand-up reporting for television.
“We want to give students a sense of the kind of preparation they’re going to need as journalists to move into that converged media world,” Boeyink said.
To that end, Boeyink and his students will visit the St. Petersburg Times, Tampa Bay Online and the Poynter Institute, where the students will attend a seminar on multimedia. The group will also attempt to visit the Sarasota Herald-Tribune.
Boeyink said he hopes that after this trip, his students become “sensitive to the shifting ground of the media,” and from that, “they’ll have a clearer sense of how to prepare themselves to do that as they move on.”
Beginning March 9, track the students’ experiences:
- Connect to the Florida students’ trip diaries
- Read the blog on The Footsteps of Ernie Pyle
- Read reports on the trip to Japan
