Reporting from overseas for the first time? When in doubt, get back to basics.
STUDENT WORK: THE HONG KONG 360 PROJECT
Last spring, the Ryerson School of Journalism in Toronto launched its first ever international summer course, sending 10 university students to Hong Kong to attend AAJA-Asia’s N3 Conference. We saw this as a unique opportunity to put our students’ burgeoning skills to the test — they’re used to reporting in Canada, but what kind of stories could they produce from spending two weeks in the other side of the world?
Most of the students didn’t speak Cantonese or Mandarin or had ever been to Hong Kong before. We needed to be real with ourselves — we could never hope to learn everything required to report authoritatively and authentically on Hong Kong’s incredibly complex political, economic and social issues in a few short few weeks. There are foreign correspondents and Asia-based reporters who have dedicated their entire careers to reporting on this region, so what were we going to realistically add to the conversation?
We decided the best approach was to get back to basics — be curious, be humble, be a listener more than a talker. Focus on telling stories about people.
We called our project “Hong Kong 360” for two reasons.
One, because wanted to fully capture the visual magic that is Hong Kong’s cityscape in panoramic, 360 degree video.
Two, because we wanted to capture a range of experiences and perspectives of Hong Kong. We wanted to ask the people who lived there what they believed was important to know.
Our students saw Hong Kong in a completely different light after exploring stories about abandoned villages in the New Territories, fiercely proud craftspeople in dying trades, and same-sex couples fighting for acceptance, just to name a few.
The result of their efforts was an ambitious multimedia feature that was recently selected as runner-up for the Emerge Award, a national student journalism prize, for best Multimedia Production. You can view the project here: http://project.journalism.ryerson.ca/hongkong360/ 🗨️
Adrian Ma is an assistant professor at Ryerson School of Journalism in Toronto, Canada.
