PUBLICATIONS Inside Illinois Vol. 25, No. 14, Feb. 2, 2006

Live from Peru, journalism students put class work into practice

By Craig Chamberlain, News Bureau Staff Writer
217-333-2894; cdchambe@uiuc.edu

Journalism students rarely leave the confines of campus to get a story. Covering the city council is as far as many travel.

But how will they respond when called upon to get the story – and get it right and get it fast – in a place where nothing is familiar?

Ten UI students last spring sought to find out, enrolling in professor Nancy Benson’s Journalism 480 course on international reporting.

Benson’s course was the first UI journalism course to send students to another country to work essentially as foreign correspondents. They spent the semester preparing, then had three weeks in Peru to do their reporting.

Their stories did not just land on Benson’s desk as completed class assignments, but were broadcast in a two-hour summer program on WILL-AM (580), the university’s news-oriented public radio station. Abby Rhodes, a graduate student in broadcast journalism from Good Hope, near Macomb, Ill., served as the producer of both the radio broadcast and a video segment about the trip for WILL-TV’s “Prairie Fire,” scheduled to be broadcast Feb. 9.

To prepare students for the trip, Benson assigned reading and brought in guest speakers to give students a background in everything Peruvian, including history, politics, religion, economics, culture and geography.

The students also used the semester to explore potential topics for the stories they could report on in Peru. In some cases, they came to realize their topics were too ambitious or just not practical, then had to look for other ideas. They made e-mail contacts with potential sources and with journalism students at a Peruvian university, who assisted them once they arrived.

Some students found other resources on campus, such as professors who were natives of Peru. And it didn’t hurt that Benson’s husband, geology and civil engineering professor Alberto Nieto, is Peruvian, and accompanied them on their trip.

The class stepped off the plane in Lima on May 16, and their work began almost immediately. They had little time to be tourists, needing instead to follow up with contacts and start setting up interviews.

On May 18, they started their Web log, which eventually totaled more than 60,000 words (www.comm.uiuc.edu/peru). The first entry: surviving their first cab ride through Lima.

The class spent about a week in Lima, a city of 8 million on the Pacific coast, before flying to Cuzco, nearly 11,000 feet up in the Andes mountains. During a week in Cuzco, they traveled to the famous ruins of Machu Picchu, and spent time in nearby villages. Their last week was in Lima.

The hurdles to getting their stories were numerous, the students said. Locations were hard to find, appointments were not kept and safety was always a concern. Communication was a constant challenge, especially for those knowing little Spanish. With the need to translate in both directions, interviews could take three times as long as it would between native speakers.

But they also found that being American journalists, even student journalists, gave them unusual access. The students were able to talk to government ministers, mayors and other high-ranking officials. At one point, Benson said, they even were scheduled to meet with Peru’s president, but he was preparing for a visit to China during the time they were there.

The students had been encouraged to pursue stories on large or broad issues, such as mining companies, the spread of evangelicalism, education and racism toward Americans in Peruvian jails.

To do some of those stories well, they had to get close – sometimes uncomfortably close – to the people and the issues involved.

The students said their trip to Peru challenged and changed them in various ways – in their view of the world, in their reporting, in the way they will travel as tourists from now on.

Benson noted that many of the students previously had traveled abroad, “but they’d never been so immersed in a country before.” They had to deal with people at all levels of society and had “seen things that as a tourist they never would have seen and experienced things they never would have experienced.”

For many of the students, the trip brought them increased confidence and encouraged them to push themselves a little harder in their reporting, Benson said. “They could see in this foreign environment what they were really capable of.”

About 1,900 UI students studied abroad last year, and more than a fifth of undergraduates will study abroad before they graduate.

Students preparing to be reporters, however, have a “special responsibility” to understand the world beyond U.S. borders, Benson said. International issues have an impact on local communities and on the reporters who cover them, and foreign correspondents play an essential role, she said.

“After all, it is only through the prism of their writing and reporting that many U.S. citizens will learn about the rest of the world.”

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