The Centre universitaire d'enseignement du journalisme (CUEJ) – the university's school of journalism – arranges for its students to spend a month on a reporting assignment in a foreign country each year. Last year candidates of the CUEJ master's programme visited India and the year before, to Palestine. From 2004 to 2011 students went to China's Hunan province.
"The idea is to go to places that are moving, opening and changing," CUEJ director Nicole Gauthier told Mizzima Business Weekly at the immersion programme's makeshift newsroom in the French Institute in Yangon. "This [Myanmar] is changing now in front of our eyes," Ms Gauthier said.
CUEJ chair Xavier Delcourt has co-organised the "delocalisation" programme –referring to the school's transfer of activities to different cities – since 1994.
He co-developed the programme after the fall of the Berlin Wall in October 1989.
"For us [faculty], the wall was the changing of the world, a new kind of globalisation in the making," said Professor Delcourt. "We asked, 'How do we face this change as a school of journalism?' "
The faculty's immediate response was to send four students to report from Berlin. Prof Delcourt said his approach to pedagogy became "teaching journalism through true experience."
Since 1994, students have spent one month working in such countries as the Czech Republic, Croatia, Macedonia, Serbia, Uzbekistan, and Bosnia.
"[Journalism] students should experience the new world by going on 'the other side of the wall,' " said Prof Delcourt. "There's no way we are just going to speak about changes."
In Yangon, the 51 CUEJ students from France and Germany are paired with Myanmar students from the French Institute and the National Management College journalism programme. Desktop computers, laptops and cameras were brought from Strasbourg for the temporary newsroom at the French Institute.
"These are crazy logistics," said Prof Delcourt.
During the seven years CUEJ students were sent to Hunan they were constantly being detained by police wary of the media, which was "an important experience for them," he said.
The programme aims to "grasp a reality that we don't understand at all by going deeper and deeper," said Prof Delcourt.
The students had little prior knowledge of Myanmar's history and do not speak Myanmar. "They [the students] start from nil," said Ms Gauthier.
The French embassy in Yangon gained approval for the programme from the Ministry of Information, said Prof Delcourt. The embassy also plays a supportive role by requesting meetings for students with government officials.
Prof Delcourt said the students quickly realised there was no culture of information in Myanmar.
"Not that people are hiding things but there is no experience of communication," he said. "When we are in front of a Myanmar government representative he just doesn't know how to deal with us."
The newsroom is filled daily with the CUEJ students, 28 Myanmar students and ten teachers, one of whom is Arnaud Valerin, Tokyo correspondent for the French daily Liberation, who graduated from CUEJ in 1998 after spending a month in Albania.
Most of the teachers are former CUEJ students, said Mr Valerin, and most of the centre's graduates have built careers in journalism.
The students include Ms Marina Strauss, a German, who is working with a team of six video journalists and six reporters to create a television programme about Myanmar youth. She has chosen to profile members of Yangon's punk community.
"We are here to show people in Europe what Myanmar is like," she said. "There is a strong punk scene in Myanmar; they are political and trying to change things."
The partnership between CUEJ and National Management College students is essential, said Ms Strauss.
"We are only here for four weeks and we are trying to describe a country; this is risky," she said. "It is easier for the Burmese students to speak with the subjects rather than a foreigner with a camera intruding in their [the subject's] world."
Mr Nicolai Morawitz, also German, who is working on a web documentary about young entrepreneurs in the information technology sector, said it had been a challenge to establish contacts for the production in four weeks.
"There is a small branch of young educated people who are well off and have spent time abroad," he said. "We will focus on this elite – a really small percentage of the population of Myanmar – but that's how it is."
One chapter of the documentary will focus on the ruling Union Solidarity and Development Party. Ms Gaelle Henry has spent two weeks meeting USDP MPs in Yangon and will travel to Nay Pyi Taw to interview Deputy Information Minister and presidential spokesperson U Ye Htut about the constitutional amendment campaign and Myanmar's role in ASEAN.
"The purpose is to not give a black and white story; we want to show something [European] media has not shown before," said Ms Henry, who is French. "We have time and we are many people reporting on the situation [in Myanmar] so I think we can do a really large report."
Ms Gauthier said the 52-page magazine will be printed in Yangon and sold in France and the television series and online documentary will be sold to French media.
"This [programme] is a fantastic asset; we have 60 persons staying for one month in a country and reporting deeply on one story," said Prof Delcourt, referring to the sales potential of the magazine, TV series and documentary. "No media can afford that."
This Article first appeared in the May 22, 2014 edition of Mizzima Business Weekly.
Mizzima Business Weekly is available in print in Yangon through Innwa Bookstore and through online subscription at www.mzineplus.com
Source: http://www.news.myanmaronlinecentre.com/2014/05/26/european-journalism-students-dig-deep-to-report-on-myanmar/
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