November 18, 2009
Bowling
Green, Ky. - An Integrated Media Team from Western Kentucky University will travel to India this month to help produce multimedia coverage of the annual global summit meetings of the world’s press.
The WKU iTeam of 14 students and three faculty members from the School of Journalism & Broadcasting will augment the publications staff of the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) reporting on the 2009 World Newspaper Congress and World Editors Forum. The meetings of more than 2,000 leading publishers and editors will be held in Hyderabad, India’s Silicon Valley, Nov. 30 through Dec. 3.
Students participating include Daniel Dressler, a Bowling Green freshman; Shakia Harris, Spencer Jenkins, Sara Sotelo, Kaitlyn Swaggert and Sara Taylor, all Louisville sophomores; Susan Zhou, an Owensboro freshman; Kelly Higgins, a senior from Decatur, Ga.; Emily Frankenburger, a Nicholasville senior; Brian Powers, a senior from Naperville, Ill.; Stacie Hewitt, a sophomore from Mount Juliet, Tenn.; Nate Spicer, a junior from Bexley, Ohio; Gina Durkan, an Elizabethtown senior; and Colleen Stewart, a Crestview Hills junior. They will join faculty members Kerry Northrup, Marjorie Yambor and Sara Hiles.
“WKU’s iMedia initiative is preparing our journalism, broadcast and ad/pr students for a world in which the media environment changes practically overnight and you never know where the next opportunities will appear,” said WKU President Gary Ransdell, himself a mass communications graduate. “Dispatching one of our integrated-media teams to India to cover the world’s publishing leaders is exactly the kind of opportunity they train for.”
The project also exemplifies WKU’s commitment to being “a leading American university with international reach,” Dr. Ransdell added.
WKU’s content crew will be primarily responsible for publishing the conference multiblog, which is a sophisticated, professional form of the common Internet weblog. Using the latest in high-tech mobile equipment, the student journalists and their instructors will post multimedia-rich entries on the site at an average rate of one every 10 minutes throughout the four days of presentations and social events.
The president of India, Her Excellency Pratibha Devisingh Patil, will address the event’s opening ceremony. The conference also features the annual awarding of the Golden Pen of Freedom to a working journalist struggling to ensure a free press. Over their four days of meetings, the world’s press representatives will debate the futures of journalism, newspapers, digital media, online news, editorial ethics and more.
In addition to the multiblog, the WKU iTeam will also produce podcasts, vidcasts, audio-enhanced photo slideshows, interactive video, geotagged images and full-length articles about the conference and its participants. Social media specialists on the team will use Twitter, Facebook and other networking channels to interact with a worldwide community of people following the conference.
More WKU news is available at http://www.wku.edu/news/index.html and at http://wkunews.wordpress.com/.
For more information, contact the WKU School of Journalism & Broadcasting at iMedia@wku.edu.
-WKU-
"A leading American university with international reach"
Office of Media Relations
Western Kentucky University
1906 College Heights Blvd., Bowling Green, Ky. 42101-3576
Phone: (270)745-4295 - Fax: (270)7455387 - E-Mail: western@wku.edu