The 'Covering China' workshop held at USC was the best session of this program so far! The professional introductions, laced with tit bits of info, and the story tellings by the reporters made the morning very interesting and illuminating. The selection of the speakers, probably done by Prof Dube, was well-represented: Rob Schmitz (an 'American' reporting China), Ching-Ching Ni (originally from China and reporting on that country with American/Chinese perspective), and Mei Fong (a Malaysian Chinese with American journalism degree and faculty experience) -- gave multiple perspectives and rekindled the journalistic spirit I enjoyed in New Delhi back in India many summers ago.
Rob's painful efforts of rechecking the story, contrasting with fellow teacher's comments about 'lies' is very interesting. Also, it's terrible to know how little time, like 2-3 minutes, correspondents like Rob have to cram their hours and hours of hard work. When I pointed this to him after the workshop, Rob's comments was "Oh! Don't get me started on that". Anyway, thanks to Clay, after heraring the radio for so many years, finally I got to meet a real face behind the microphone.
Ching-Ching's climbing and down the 'cave school' stories gave me good fodder to impress my students about the opportunities they should make the best use of.
Mei Fong's achieving the goal of getting the word 'anus' on the front page of her paperWall Street Journal, reminded me of my 8th graders getting a kick out of playng with planet called 'Ur aanus' during a lesson on astronomy.
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