Today in class Whitney invited folks to join her on a trip to Hermosillo, Sonora, Mexico for a long weekend to cover a Tucson Rotary club going down there to administer vaccines to people who couldn’t otherwise afford them. It would be a great chance for a few students to get some international reporting under their belts. Hermosillo is only about five hours away from Tucson by car.
But not to be outdone, Josh told the class his church was sponsoring an aid mission to Haiti to help earthquake victims and members of the class are invited to sign up to cover the work. That trip would be over Spring Break in March and students would have to pay for their own air travel, I expect via charter. Josh is planning on going for sure and hopes to post stories on Border Beat from there.
In addition to those ambitious announcements, we had another good class. John DeDios gave a quick tutorial about how to put together a SoundSlides presentation. Everyone followed his talk nicely all the way through how to preview the actual show. Once he got into how to actually put the finished show online, almost everybody glazed over and got lost. Jocelyn was the most expressive about that. We’ll almost certainly have to go over that again and resurrect a written version of the directions about how to get that done. By the way, Jocelyn is going to take fun pictures of everyone on Wednesday while Matt is collecting bio info on the staff. All that should be online in a week so you and the world will get to meet our intrepid border reporters.
Most of the class members have good ideas in the works but Jocelyn, Nicky, and Jackie got out of the blocks first by posting drafts of their stories on the site’s administrative section. They have lots of work to do, but are up and running. It will be great once new stories start churning through Border Beat again — kind of like turning on its blood.
Whitney and Christina will be co-editors this semester. Hopefully, they will post some thoughts here to give you some insight into what Border Beat looks like from their perspectives.
