Second semestre à la Columbia Journalism School: c'est parti!

Visual storytelling (photojournalisme), business and economics reporting, China seminar (un cours sur comment couvrir la Chine, avec Howard French) et video profiles : ce sont mes cours du second semestre. J'ai déjà beaucoup (trop) de boulot et suis déjà en manque cruel de sommeil, mais je ne m'en rend qu'à peine compte tellement j'adore mes cours!  Beaucou de terrain et de reportage en perspective...
Voici les premières photos que j'ai prises pour mon cours de DM photo:

One Mid-Autumn festival afternoon

The time keeper

Voici mon 1er audio slideshow réalisé à New York.
Résultat plus que modeste... (Ceux réalisés à Shanghai sont visibles sur ma page Viméo):



The last 15 minutes from Hélène Franchineau on Vimeo.
Every morning, Johnny Votta Jr. takes care of the NYU students around Washington Square Park. He makes sure no one gets run over by a cab and yells the time remaining before class. His morning hobby has earned him some sort of celebrity status.

Yankee vs. Red Sox

Love it! We are in a very competitive school, which fosters creativity and excellence, so when the Dean of Academic Affairs, Bill Grueskin, does not know what to do with a spare ticket to a baseball game... He organizes a twitter/haiku competition for the students.

Read below the email we all received in the evening: 

Dear students,

I have two extra tickets for J School students for the Yankee-Red Sox game scheduled at 4 pm on Saturday, Sept. 25. And rather than have a boring raffle to give them out, we decided to have a contest.

To embrace old and new media, we will give one ticket to the student who authors the best tweet about the Yankee-Red Sox rivalry, and one ticket to the student who can do the best haiku about the rivalry. The winning entries will be original, passionate and historically accurate.

(...)

Your tweet must be 140 characters or less. Your haiku must be three lines, with five syllables in the first line, seven in the second, five in the third.

To enter, send your Tweet to (XXX)  and/or your Haiku to (XXX). Only current J School students (part- or full-time, MS, MA or PhD) can enter. Deadline is 10 am on Monday, Sept. 13.

You can enter each contest only once (thus, each student can send in one Haiku and/or one Tweet.) 

(...)

Each contest will have one winner and two runners-up. If a winner can’t go, the ticket goes to the next runner-up in that category.

Winning and runner-up entries will be announced via the J School list serve. All decisions are final, and arbitrary.

(...)

Good luck!

So now, wait...who are the Red Sox?

Boot camp

Wow, time flies...I thought my latest post was about one week ago, turns out it is a lot older...
I am still doing the "technical training" at the J school: audio and photo training. It is frankly nothing new for me, as I have been doing the same at Sciences Po. Except Final Cut Pro, because I had been using Avid Newscutter instead (which, I think, is better! But maybe my opinion will change during the course of the year).
So basically, I was a little bored in class, but I really hope that will change. The school is so expensive I can not afford to be bored.

For my audio profile I interviewed a resident E.R. physician, a lovely girl who agreed to talk to me during her break. She was so nice. She was the first person I talked to after we had been given the assignment, so I got lucky. She was coming out of Saint Luke's hospital and going to get a cup of iced coffee. I want to post my radio on the blog, but it is terrible....

Then for my audio postcard, I went to Spin on a Friday night and found out that it is a great place: a bar, good music with a DJ, a ping pong practice with tables that you can rent (it's a bit on the pricey side unfortunately), and every Friday night, the "Dirty Dozen" competition with the best players of the country (and abroad too since there were some French players that night, woohoo!). It was a lot of fun, I could talk to the players, and there was one funny guy, Kazuyuki Yokoyama, who can not help but strip down to his underwear to entertain the crowd.
Oh, and Susan Sarandon is one of the business partners, and she was there with her friends that night. Sweet.

Columbia

Quand suis-je passée de l'autre côté? Quand ai-je arrêté de m'intéresser à la France pour tourner définitivement mon regard vers l'étranger (surtout la Chine)? 2005, probablement.

Alors que je vais commencer une année à l'école de journalisme de Columbia University à New York (une des 8 universités américaines faisant parties de la prestigieuse Ivy League, et la meilleure école de journalisme du pays), je réalise qu'à 26 ans j'ai déjà passé un an en Grande-Bretagne (Cardiff), six mois à Washington D.C., un peu plus de deux ans en Chine, et maintenant une autre année aux Etats-Unis. 4 ans et 1/2 de ma vie en dehors de la France. Un pays que j'aime mais de loin.
Je suis arrivée à New York début août pour m'imprégner un peu de l'ambiance et prendre mes repères. Les cours débutent officiellement ce lundi 16, et j'ai passé toute cette semaine à découvrir l'école, son fonctionnement, l'administration et les cours avec les quelques autres 200 élèves du programme.
Je vis dans un appartement appartenant à Columbia, avec deux autres étudiantes. Je donne sur Broadway, il y a une multitude de commerces autour de moi, et je suis à deux pas de l'école et du métro. "Awesome!", comme dirait une américaine naturellement un peu trop enthousiaste.
Ce qui l'est moins, c'est le coût de l'année: 45 000 dollars, et une bourse maigrelette que Columbia a bien voulu m'octroyer dans des conditions mystérieuses. Je compare aux autres étudiants, et je vois que le compte n'y est pas.
Mais pourtant je vais être avec les meilleurs profs, je vais aller arpenter les rues du Queens plusieurs jours par semaine pour mon cours de Reporting and Writing, je vais rencontrer des journalistes exceptionnels qui, je l'espère, me donneront les armes pour réussir dans la profession.
A ce niveau nous sommes bien loin du journalisme plan-plan à la française. Tant mieux.