Getting in the Swing of Things

We started day with classes like every Monday. We had classes with a long-term journalist of The Spokesman-Review, Alison Boggs. She is now a professor with a career of over 20 years. We covered topics such as news values, judgment, as well as sourcing and story ideas. As all these topics are so important in journalism and media , we were very into them and we discussed a lot.

Discussions were different and included talking about the position of journalists back in our countries in the Balkans. Through our discussions, it seemed that using methods of eavesdropping for finding information for news as a very controversial topic. We talked about big journalism cases such as Watergate affair, Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, the case with WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, a recent story that was covered by medias all over the world. Alison gave us many helpful pieces of advice about finding sources for story ideas and some of the main values of a news story. We also did a little workshop in teams where we were supposed to choose 5 most important news from a list of 10. It was a very fun and useful exercise.

After classes and lunch break we chose our evening activities. This night it was bowling time. For many students first time ever! We gathered with our students’ ambassadors and program organizers and had a lot of fun!

We decided to end up our day at the Coug, one of the most popular restaurants in Pullman that dates back to 1932! The Coug is a famous place for celebrating the graduation of WSU students since the very beginning. Very often people that graduated decades ago come here to remember their student days. The night was even better when we met some of the students who live and study at WSU currently. We discussed about differences between Europian and American educational systems as well as life on Campus. What else could we have asked to end our productive day in Pullman rather than gathering at the Coug?