UNESCO Day 1

Bonjour, again,

Today was the first day of the UNESCO Conference (EJTA - The Future of Journalism Education). Once we finally made it to the conference, we were able to watch two presentations.

They started off with an introduction, where they talked about the changing state of journalism. One major topic seems to be citizen journalism and whether or not they are considered journalists. According to a majority of the audience, bloggers are not journalists. They also suggested defining a journalist as a professional so that they are respected in a different way than a blogger and held to different standards.

The first speaker was George Brock, from the University city of London. He noted three key observations in the field of journalism today: 1. Perspective. Journalism is constantly facing changes, and the state we are in is yet another. 2. Disruptions are disasters for some people and opportunity for others. He said to never let a good crisis go to waste. 3. Crisis returns people to their first principles -- he said this is a good time to ask what we're doing and why we're doing it. He also gave a list of four functions: Sense-making, verification, eyewitness and investigative journalism that are key parts of journalism today.

The second presentation was by the Zurich University of Applied Sciences, and they talked about the competencies within the field of journalism. There are 10 competencies with 5 qualifications each, which equals 50 qualifications total. They had editors-in-chief from various areas in Europe and other journalism professionals rank the qualifications they felt were most important -- some personality traits and others relating to work ethics. Some of the higher ranked ones were: being reliable, being able to work under time pressure, knowing current events, being able to determine the relevance of a subject for a specific audience, being able to discover newsworthy issues on the basis of in-depth researching, being aware of the impact of your information on the public, being able to adjust to unforeseen situations, having a clear idea of the required quality of journalistic products and having the ability to balance stories.

Both of these presentations were interesting, and I'm excited to see tomorrow's group of presentations. However, I am nervous for our presentation (we are going last) considering the group we are presenting to. We have already had a couple comments as to why America is at a European Union conference, and when one "gentleman" asked where we were from today, when he heard our response, he raised his eyebrows in disapproval. Seems to be a good mixture between people who are pleasant and people who have a hatred for Americans. Maybe our presentation will help clear up any misunderstandings? I hope so.

Tomorrow is our last day, and our most important! Wish us luck on this presentation!

*Candace