April 13, 2009 — Coral Gables — An international multimedia workshop sponsored by the Knight Center for International Media was held at Hong Kong Baptist University from April 13-17, 2009. The workshop, titled Ethical Reporting of the World’s Most Underreported Issues, attracted journalism professors from all over the Asia, including China, Singapore, India, the Philippines, Thailand, Mongolia and Taiwan.
Directed by Rich Beckman, professor and Knight Chair in Visual Journalism at the University of Miami School of Communication, the workshop was designed to inspire educators across Asia to begin teaching multimedia skills in class to improve their journalistic storytelling.
“The goal is to work with them on developing assignments and content related to the mission of the Knight Center and to empower them to begin the necessary curriculum changes in their journalism and communication programs,” Beckman said.
Using skills acquired at the workshop, participants will now begin working with their own students to create stories focusing on the world’s most underreported issues, such as poverty, urban migration, environmental sustainability and gender equality. Participants were taught hands-on multimedia reporting techniques by professionals and practitioners in the field.
Workshop participants are expected to return to their classrooms and begin developing multimedia stories on underreported issues in their cities. These stories will become part of the Knight Center’s World Cities anchor project. Based on global subjects typically underreported and underrepresented in the media, the World Cities project will draw attention to some of the most urgent issues of the time through research, multimedia training and the production of compelling media products over significant blocks of time.
The Knight Center for International Media expects to create a connected network of 100 universities and colleges around the world through a series of multimedia workshops over the next five years. Multimedia content developed through this network over the next few years will create a valuable body of journalism focused on global issues that affect us all but fail to find consistent coverage in the media.
The next workshop will be held at Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa, for teachers and trainers from across Africa in September 2009.
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The Knight Center for International Media at the School of Communication, University of Miami, was established in February 2007 to address the assumption that the world will not solve its most difficult problems unless its people learn to communicate more easily across national borders. The mission of the Center is to integrate scholastic and creative energies to serve and transform the global journalism and communication profession. The Center serves as an incubator for cross-disciplinary collaborations that allow communication professionals and journalists to interact with researchers, media makers, technologists, artists and scholars to develop new media models and methods for empowering the future leaders of the communication field. The Center will focus on the expanding realm of multimedia visual journalism and cross cultural communication in the Americas and beyond. Through established endowed Knight Chairs, a program of professional residencies, and other projects, the Center will build an international network of collaborations to address underrepresented issues of global significance.
