An international reporting experience from Urbino, Italy
When Yue Wu arrived in Urbino to start working on the Urbino Project she was anxious about what the multimedia reporting course had in store for her.
The month-long course, sponsored by Iowa State, was composed of three sections: feature writing, photography and video. Students each had to write their own story and create their own photo project and worked in pairs to create a video component for the most conducive stories.
Greenlee School professor Dennis Chamberlin directed the 2011 program. Chamberlin had served as the photography instructor in 2009 and returned this year as the multimedia program director as well as one of two photography instructors.
“This class allowed us to offer students an intensive bootcamp experience in a gorgeous small town setting in Italy,” Chamberlin said. “Not only could students work on improving their journalistic skills but they picked up survival Italian and had ample opportunities to find the best gelaterias and cafes in Urbino.”
Urbino, a small Italian college town, features a small town atmosphere with the historical richness Italy is known for, with attractions such as the Palazzo Ducale, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
The program featured 10 faculty members, including award-winning television journalists, a Nieman Fellow, editors of major magazines and two Pulitzer Prize winners who each brought their own areas of expertise to the classroom. Among the entire faculty Chamberlin said that he calculated approximately 175 years of professional experience. With a student/teacher ratio of 4:1, students were provided with an intimate learning experience with some of the best in the industry.
“It is a pretty rare situation for most college courses to have so much experience brought together for one month of class,” Chamberlin said.
Once the 41 students, five of which were from Iowa State, arrived in Urbino they were faced with the task of finding their own stories.
With a background based in photography and English as her second language, Wu was excited to work on the course’s video component, while the writing aspect had her worried.
“It [was] pretty stressful. I spent two weeks looking for a good story idea, [mine were] rejected three times, so that was hard,” Wu, junior in pre journalism and mass communication, said. “While I was watching other students getting started on their stories I was still looking for [mine], so that was pretty stressful.”
Once she found her story idea, which was about a local cheese maker, Wu’s learning experience truly began.
“One thing I learned the most was how to work with people,” Wu said. “How you go to somewhere you’ve never been before and find an interesting story and try to dig in it and report it in different ways, that was my favorite part.”
Wu met with the cheese maker many times while in Urbino, documenting every aspect of his daily life. She spent time with him while he herded and milked his goats, throughout his cheese-making process, at home with his family and at the local market where he sold cheese that he made.
Greenlee student Yue Wu takes notes while listening to photography instructor Paweł Wyszomirski. Photo by Dennis Chamberlin
With the help of the program’s faculty and interpreters working with the program from the local university, Wu used the course’s three mediums to provide a thorough overview of the Italian’s life: Where he came from, how he got started at his career and how he persevered through hard times to pursue his passion of making high quality, organic cheese for the Le Marche region of Italy.
Not only did Wu come out of the Urbino Project with photos the faculty deemed best made from the program and her first written story. She left Urbino with an extended family, from all over the world.
“I loved the people there; [they] were my favorite part,” Wu said. “A summer program is supposed to be like after one month everyone is ready to go home, but after this program was done I wasn’t done yet. I feel like we got to know each other really well and were like a family.”
Having to leave all of the new friends that she made in Urbino brought Wu to tears, but the experience was one that she’ll remember for a lifetime and will influence the work that she does as a journalist.
Next summer the study abroad course will return with essentially the same faculty and a slightly refined structure. The faculty are already gathering story ideas for the students and organizing tighter integration between all the skills that students will work on, Chamberlin said. To apply for the 2012 program click here.
Text by Matt Wettengel
Click here to view Greenlee students' work from The Urbino Project.