Tuesday, July 29, 2008

How to teach journalism in Azerbaijan.

Eric is an American journalist currently in Azerbaijan.

He relates on his blog his first day of teaching a group of journalists.


One useful assignment I give for the first day is a news story assessment. I bring in a bunch of newspapers, and have the students pick out a couple of good news stories and a couple of bad news stories. Then – they explain their evaluations to the class and me. Their assessments reveal how they evaluate the news in general.


He continues relating some of the problems

one fellow today picked out one story as a bad story, because it was about a journalist who had been libeled in the government media. The article he picked out said that the journalist was actually a good guy. So this was confusing. Confusing = bad. Perhaps it was not surprising that the student himself worked for a government media outlet. Cognitive dissonance is uncomfortable.

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