unljnews

By CHARLYNE BERENS

Computer screen shows the parties who are participating in the town hall meeting in KIJAC's studio

If one goal of higher education is to make students’ world bigger, the journalism college has found an efficient and cost-effective way to do that:  Get students from UNL talking in real time with college students in Kosovo, Norway and South Africa via an international town hall meeting.

“It’s really empowering to share ideas with people from around the world,” said professor Barney McCoy, who has led the J school’s involvement in the meetings. “By engaging in these meetings, we find that we have more in common and wish to do more than we imagined to make this world a better place.”

The college has been part of seven such meetings since the gatherings began in 2008. Discussions have focused on topics that matter to people around the world with specific attention to how the media have dealt with those topics.

Technical assistance for the hour-long, real-time meetings has come from professor Mike Goff, staff members Luther Hinrichs and Vance Payne and graduate assistant Belita Kalala.

Other participating universities are:  Gimlekollen School of Journalism and Communication in Kristiansand, Norway; the Kosovo Institute of Journalism and Communication in Pristina, Kosovo; University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa; and the University of Mississippi, Oxford, Miss.

UNL students who attended the Feb. 24 town hall meeting about press censorship and press freedom wrote about their reactions to the process.

The technology was amazing

Marie Brew: I thought it was so neat how the set-up was and that you can actually connect with people across the world in a press conference online. I was very surprised and so impressed with this. I thought the meeting was very interesting, and it was really neat to hear the different opinions of the students and faculty members from the different institutes.

Jana Schneider: The video conference connecting Gimlekollen University in Norway, Wits University in South Africa, the University of Mississippi, the Kosovo Institute of Journalism and Communications and UNL is honestly what I found the most impressive about the international town meeting on Wednesday.  Technology has come such a long way, and to be able to accomplish this kind of interaction between students from all over the world is astounding.

The discussion of press freedom was fascinating

Nicol Woody: Knowing very little about this subject myself, I found the conversation quite interesting and wish there would have been a little bit more time.

Jana Schneider: Freedom of press varies greatly around the world today, and I found it really interesting when the professors from Norway stated that their journalists self-censor because the audience is very critical.  Even though they are not bound under any kind of law or procedure, they find it necessary to censor their work because of the citizens.  It’s similar in Kosovo and South Africa, while the professor from Kosovo explained that they have “no clear cut forums of censorship, journalists receive a lot of complaints and pressure from the government” and also backlash from their own people.

Press freedom is a complicated topic

Lauren Peterson: More than a third of the world’s people live in countries where there is no press freedom.  This statistic blew my mind.  I believe that many people in America, along with myself, take for granted the fact that we, as citizens of the United States of America, have the right to publish newspapers, magazines, and books without government interference or prior censorship.  It was particularly interesting to hear about the differences in degrees of censorship in countries right across the Atlantic Ocean.

Nicol Woody: I thought it was a good question South Africa posed to Kosovo about having parallel circumstances in a newly freed society and wondering what similarities they were experiencing.  It seems to be all about financial pressure to not print or report the truth at times because the government and interest groups are heavily involved financially

Marie Brew: From the professor in Kosovo, I learned that regular newspapers started functioning after the Second World War and that often many of the homework assignments given to students pertain to advertising in the media and how that creates a marketing issue. When discussing with the faculty from Norway I learned that they experience a lot of controversy. … In South Africa, the professor explained how they have a solid constitution guaranteeing freedom of media and speech but still experience problems with it and how the press is used as a weapon of struggle.

Lauren Peterson: I learned that in countries without freedom of the press, the government actually believes that the media exists to benefit them. As I listened to the students in other countries and even those sitting around me share stories of how they put themselves in danger to fight for the freedom to express themselves without government interference, I wondered if someday I would have the courage to do the same.