For the sixth consecutive year, UGA’s James M. Cox Jr. Center for International Mass Communication Training and Research hosted traveling journalists through the Edward R. Murrow Program for Journalists. Sponsored by the Department of State’s International Visitor Leadership Program, the journalists were on campus Nov. 3-4. While in Georgia, they also met with editors from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and CNN.
Fourteen journalists from French-speaking countries including Burundi, Chad, Comoros, Mali, Mauritania and Togo came to the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication to discuss media election coverage and the role of social media in the U.S. society. None of the visiting journalists hailed from countries currently affected by the Ebola outbreak.
“Across the years of this program, University of Georgia students have learned a lot about the media and political systems in a variety of countries,” said Tudor Vlad, associate director of the Cox International Center.
While they were on campus, the Murrow Fellows met with Grady College Dean Charles Davis and participated in discussions about social media led by Karen Russell, a Jim Kennedy New Media Professor and an associate professor of public relations, and Itai Himelboim, an associate professor of telecommunications. They observed the college’s digital and broadcast journalism majors in the newsroom of Grady Newsource as the students covered the Nov. 4 election-a session coordinated by David Hazinski, a Jim Kennedy New Media Professor and an associate professor of telecommunications, and lecturer Dodie Cantrell-Bickley. The visiting journalists discussed U.S. elections with Charles Bullock, the Richard B. Russell Professor in Political Science at UGA’s School of Public and International Affairs, and attended a session at UGA’s African Studies Institute.