Six days to a new hemisphere

...well, seven, actually.  When we land at Shanghai’s Pudong Airport, it will already be Wednesday evening, even though we leave O’Hare on Tuesday. 

But in any event, it’s going to be an eye-opening two weeks for me and the student journalists.  As WILL AM 580’s news director, I’m one of two “professional” members of the China group, along with Professor Nancy Benson.  But in a way, I’m a student too—I’ve never been to Asia, and I’ve never been to a nation where not just the spoken language, but the written one will be completely unrecognizable to me.  And though they’re classified as students (they’re working on graduate degrees), two colleagues on the trip are also colleagues at WILL—John Paul, who’s familiar to many local TV viewers for his work at WILL and WCIA, and Michael Koliska, a part-time AM 580 reporter who also has reporting experience in his native Germany.  If you pay attention to AM 580’s sports stories, you may also recognize Sam Unger, who as an undergraduate student has filed many sports and news stories for us.

On this trip I’ll be helping students organize their stories to fit into a two-hour documentary to air on AM 580 in July.  I did the same with journalism students who produced pieces for the documentary “Assignment: Peru” in 2005, though I didn’t travel with them to South America.  But this time, I’ll be able to more closely work with students on their pieces—imagine the difficulty in reaching that last-minute necessary source abroad when you’ve already returned home!

While I’m there, besides submitting occasionally for this blog, I’ll produce pieces for AM 580. I hope to produce a profile of a local teacher of gongfu (astute 1970’s TV aficionados know it as Kung Fu) who’s returning to central China to continue his training, which he has maintained since the age of 5.  You can see Demitri Daniels’ picture below, teaching class outside his Urbana school.  I also have a scheduled interview with the head of the state of Illinois’ trade office in Shanghai, and I hope to examine the UI-China link in education. 

I say “hope” because I—and the rest of the class—are quickly learning the challenges of lining up sources and honing down story ideas in a foreign country with unfamiliar languages and cultural protocols.  As I said, I’m a student too!