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The Asian Media & Mass Communication Conference 2010 Osaka, Japan
4 things to help journalism students to take part in the media revolution
By Yumi Wilson
Assistant Professor of Journalism
San Francisco State University
1600 Holloway Avenue
SF, CA 94132
415-298-8229
ywilson@sfsu.edu
This past summer, I was given an extraordinary opportunity to work on the Vietnam
Reporting Project, which is overseen by San Francisco State’s Renaissance Journalism
Center. The project, funded by the Ford Foundation, sent 15 journalists and students to
Vietnam to investigate the lingering effects of Agent Orange, a powerful dioxin-laden
herbicide used by American troops during the Vietnam War to clear brush and enemy
territory.
As a journalism educator at San Francisco State University, I chose two students based
on their work on campus publication and in my reporting and opinion writing classes.
One student had been my teaching assistant and the former breaking news editor for the
campus newspaper. She had just graduated in May, and she had demonstrated great skills
in organizing and editing work. The other student was finishing up an internship at the
hyper-local news site, Mission Local. She had proven herself as a strong feature writer
and had done several short multimedia projects.
Though neither student owned a video camera or a Mac, I believed that this was the
perfect opportunity to help two traditionally trained journalists transform themselves into
backpack journalists, defined by journalist and educator Bill Gentile as those who use a
“hand-held digital camera to tell stories in a more immediate, more intimate fashion than
is achievable using a larger team with camera person, sound person, correspondent and
producer. “
We had two months to get ourselves ready to “do it all,” and I thought this would be
plenty of time to prepare for the work ahead. Our mission was to travel to Ho Chi Minh
City, where we would focus on how dioxin, the byproduct in Agent Orange, had caused
deformities and disabilities among third-generation Vietnamese people.
So, there were two challenges for the project. One: To report on a very complex and
controversial story and gather enough convincing evidence to link Agent Orange to the
certain disabilities among third-generation Vietnamese people. Two: To produce a
multimedia project and use social media tools to help tell and distribute the stories.
I realize the goals of my project were quite ambitious. None of us spoke Vietnamese.
None of us had ever been to Vietnam. And we had very limited multimedia skills. My
students had never used Twitter, for example. Yet I remained optimistic because they
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