Five students to report in Prague over summer

By Rachel Honrud
J-School Web Reporter

photo illustration by Will Moss

Five J-School students will head to Prague, Czech Republic, in June to participate in a new program that involves the exchange of UM journalism students with Charles University.

Zach Franz, Mary Rizos, Israel Tockman, Sean Breslin and Ashley McKee (that's the order of their floating heads on the map above ) will spend three weeks in Prague working with five Czech journalism students from Charles University. They will research and write stories on the primary minority group there: the Romanies.

“I don’t know very much about the Romanies,” print senior Franz said. “It sounds like maybe there hasn’t been a lot of journalistic work done on that particular population before, so I think it’ll be really neat to try to find something new and see what we can say about it.”

Charlie Hood, the former J-School dean who will direct the program, said he hopes the students emerge from the experience able to compare and contrast public perceptions and news coverage about minorities in other countries. He also expects they’ll develop a broader understanding of how a nation’s culture shapes the way minorities are perceived by the public and reported upon by the news media, he said in an e-mail interview.

The students will attend classes at Charles University, team-taught by Hood and Jan Krecek, a Charles journalism professor, and then will team up with a Czech partner to write stories about the Roma minority, said Hood. The stories will be published in a specially created online publication. After three weeks, he said, the Czech group will come back to Montana and cover American Indian news with the UM students.

“Having lived in Prague for several years … I had seen similarities in the ways the two minorities have been treated in their respective societies, and suggested it as a possible project,” Hood said.

Students chosen for the trip are, needless to say, excited.

“I’ve never been overseas,” said Breslin, a junior print student. “I’ve never been anywhere except Canada, so this is … a really big deal for me, I think, just to get to go somewhere that I would otherwise never get to go and meet a whole bunch of people that I would never get to meet.”

The students are also looking forward to forging international relationships. “I’m looking forward just to getting out of the United States for a while,” said Tockman, a first-year graduate student in print. “I’m just glad to be getting to know some people overseas and I just think the people in the Czech Republic are probably more politically mature than people in the U.S.”

One student hopes to make a career out of the type of work she will be doing in Prague. “What I want to do when I am older is report on people and cultures that are extremely different than anything I’ve ever known,” said McKee, a photo senior.

Franz is the only student interviewed who has actually been to Prague, but only for one day. “It was awesome and I’m excited to see more of it, but I’m also really excited to just write interesting stories,” he said.

Most of the students are also a little anxious.

“I’m certainly nervous about going to a place where you’re so obviously an outsider,” Breslin said. Franz added, “I don’t speak any Czech and I don’t know very much about the Czech Republic, so I feel like, you know, what can I possibly contribute when I’m there.”

Tockman agrees with Franz on the language barrier. After listening to a Prague radio broadcast online, he’s found the language hard to follow. “I think with the time allotted to prepare ourself language-wise, our understanding of the language is going to be very cursory,” he said.

Tockman said he is also worried about getting into sticky situations socially, raising questions with Czechs about the Romanies and “just putting my foot in my mouth or just stirring up kind of a hornet’s nest.” Czech people have strong opinions about the Romanies, according to what he’s learned through research, he said.

McKee has also been doing some research. “Right now I’ve just kind of been looking at Prague [on the Internet],” McKee said. She intends to look up some phrases in the Czech language that will be helpful to her while in Prague.

In addition to online research and listening to some Prague radio, Tockman said he is re-reading a book by President Vaclav Havel of the former Czechoslovakia, explaining the president’s ideas of turning a communist economy into a more democratic one.

Rizos, a second-year graduate student in photo, has been working on a photo project out of state and was unavailable for comment.

Hood said there should be plenty of chances for other students who want to go to Prague. “We’re hoping that this will be the first of many such exchanges,” he said.

Of the students chosen this year, he said, “We were looking for people who would represent the University of Montana well and who would work with people from other cultures well.”

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