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Where there is no law, but every man does what is right in his own eyes, there is the least of real liberty
Henry M. Robert

Summer, youth, intellect

The Den’s School of Journalism is 10!
22 May, 2012 - 00:00
MORE THAN 300 STUDENTS HAVE DONE THEIR INTERNSHIP AT THE SUMMER SCHOOL OF JOURNALISM. SUMMER SCHOOL 2010 INTERNS: “WE ARE OBLIGED TO BE SOMEWHERE AND DO SOMETHING” / Photo by Yaroslav MIZERNY

This year Den is announcing admission requirements for its 10th Summer School of Journalism. A decade seems to be a short time from the historical perspective, but it is quite a long time from the perspective of a human life and a venerable age from the angle of a social project. Our first participants, who did their internships at Den as long ago as 2002, are 30 now – they are fulfilling themselves in a certain profession and some are raising their own children. For example, Yana Kutko, a former Ostroh Academy and Den’s Summer School student, is a well-known culture journalist in Volyn and a mother of two cute toddlers. My counterparts from Zaporizhia, Dnipropetrovsk, Kyiv, and Ostroh, and I were sixth-generation interns at the Den’s Summer School of Journalism. I must say I am still in touch with many of my schoolmates, and the school became one of the decisive life factors for some people of our year of study, including me.

Two years after doing the internship, I got an opportunity to deal with the summer school as a Den journalist. But this did not remove the element of study because every year, when we admit new participants, we rediscover the Ukrainian young people and regions.

To quote Den’s editor-in-chief Larysa Ivshyna, “the school of journalism was born impulsively, for we always felt a need for renewal.” In fact, it still functions on the basis of two strong foundations – the newspaper’s tradition and a need for renewal: identity and modernization.

“Every new ‘landing force’ from Ostroh, Kharkiv, Zaporizhia, and Lviv helped us feel what was going on in the youth milieu. A ‘special menu’ was prepared for each summer school. On their part, the students showed us on their own example how the social demand and supply met,” Larysa Ivshyna says. “It seems to me it is a good laboratory which has brought valuable experience to our newspaper’s staff and, we hope, to all those who were involved in our work.”

And it is not only students who were involved. We work as sparring partners with many lecturers from Ukraine’s best higher educational institutions. The lecturers give future journalists the knowledge of instruments and send them certain impulses at daily classes, while we test these impulses for durability and add some more national character to the Ukrainian journalist education. There is also a reverse process. For example, in Zaporizhia, after Viktor Kostiuk and journalism students students had taken an active part in the summer school, the faculty introduced a special course on James Mace, and in Lviv students make a weekly analysis of Den’s Friday issues.

Of course, the processes that the summer school launches in the youth milieu have not yet reached a mass scale. Yet, over the past nine years, thanks to our pinpoint efforts and readiness of others to respond to them, we managed to form a nationwide network of people embedded with crystals of new thinking. These people are absolutely different and unconventional in their own way, but what unites them is knowledge of their own country. Maybe, someone will say it is a labor of Sisyphus, especially in the absence of any support grants. But the point is that the school means, above all, belief in the others, in their aspiration to get to know something. It is intellectual exchange and, moreover, continuous development. In the course of nine years, we have had more than a hundred interesting meetings. The school participants – more than 300 over the whole period – have visited the Kyiv National Preserve Complex “Sophia of Kyiv,” the house museum of Mykhailo Hrushevsky, the Ivan Honchar Museum, and the Samizdat Museum. A special point of the internship was “intellectual tours,” such as Kyiv-Kruty-Baturyn-Kyiv, Kyiv-Hustynia-Kachanivka-Sokyryntsi-Trostianets-Kyiv, and Kyiv-Trypillia-Cherkasy-Chyhyryn-Subotiv-Kholodny Yar-Kyiv. All the texts prepared by school participants are enough to form a sizable book.

We spoke to the Den journalist Olha RESHETYLOVA, the summer school former participant and longtime supervisor, about the evolution of the school, its special purpose, and place in the system of journalist education.

Olha, first you were a participant in the Summer School of Journalism and then its supervisor. These are different experiences. Could you characterize and perhaps compare both of them?

“Indeed, there is so much in common between the two things. First of all, no matter whether you are a school participant or supervisor, you have to learn and work on yourself a lot. As I am not a journalist by profession, I am still learning the instruments and theory of journalism. I am learning many things together with or even from the school participants. But the point is not even in journalism as such. The Den’s Summer School of Journalism means, first of all, the formation of a common life-philosophy platform. For example, Iryna Bochar, a 2010 student, confessed after doing the school that journalism was not her cup of tea – she wants to do research and social work (you will agree that it is a very useful self-appraisal). Yet we often cross our ways at all kinds of events, and she sends her friends’ articles to our newspaper. Like many other school participants, she shares the same philosophical views with Den. It cannot be otherwise because the store of knowledge a student acquires in the several weeks of training at the editorial office becomes his or her reference mark in time and space: I must be here, I must read and see this, and this, on the contrary, is stuff and nonsense… This basic reference point still has a time limit, and if you stop improving yourself, you may lose it. Unfortunately, this does happen. As the editor-in-chief Larysa Ivshyna says, ‘everybody is responsible for their lifetime project.’ I think it is a very wise phrase.

“I was the school politics section participant in 2005. That was my second longtime contact with Kyiv, the first one having been shortly before, during the Orange Revolution. I can remember writing in our student newspaper after doing my internship at Den that it was a test for provinciality. And the point is not in that I spent some time in the capital, although encountering a megalopolis was also a test of sorts for students from other cities. I meant a different thing, namely, being able to find a place in a team of professionals who work in a streamlined way, perform clearly-defined functions, quickly react, and think big. This is a challenge you must be prepared to take up if you are going to sign up for Den’s Summer School, irrespective of where you are from.”

The Summer School of Journalism is not at a standstill – it is evolving. Where do you think progress is?

“In 2008 Ms. Ivshyna suggested that writing an essay on a Den’s Library book be a mandatory requirement for taking in new school participants. Firstly, this makes it possible to select highly qualified participants, and, secondly and very importantly, we will not have to start from scratch every time – we can be sure that the participants have passed at least a part of the way which Den’s and its readers have done for 15 years. Besides, the circle of the guests who meet the participants widens with every passing year. A unique item in the school curriculum is traveling on Route One together with Den’s journalists and staff – at the newspaper’s cost, incidentally. I can say it is a risky but very necessary investment of Den in gifted youth. Many do not believe, incidentally, that projects like this can be carried out on a voluntary basis. I have often received phone calls and been asked how much it costs to attend the Den’s Summer School of Journalism. Whenever I said that all this was absolutely free of charge and, moreover, we paid the graduates emoluments for the materials they published, the callers refused to believe me.

“What can undoubtedly be called progress is the fact that, after leaving the school, participants continue to be in touch and are increasingly trying to be in Den’s orbit. The school-leavers not only contribute to Den – they are sort of the newspaper’s agents of influence in their areas of communication. It is in fact the formation of social assets in a country that has a torn-apart informational space and lacks common ideas.”

Could you say, as a former participant and the current supervisor, which aspects in the education of a young journalist are the most important today? What should be inculcated in the younger generation first of all? On the other hand, the interns have already received a certain amount of university education. What are the most difficult problems you are facing in this respect?

“Incidentally, I am also a young journalist who should be brought up from time to time (smiles). But, seriously, by far the most difficult problem for participants every year is the formulation of questions for interviewing Den’s visitors. I can explain this by the fact that Ukrainian education is mostly an education of monologues: first the teacher speaks and everybody listens, then the students answer, and the teacher listens. Just try to interrupt the teacher who is rambling on with a lecture which he has delivered hundreds of times and learned by heart! (Undoubtedly, there are exceptions which only confirm the rule.)

“After all, the elementary inability to have a dialogue, for which school is to blame, is now a Ukrainian nationwide problem.

“What does the younger generation need? To begin with, it is such a simple but perhaps the most important thing as conscientiousness and responsibility. These features are very rare now. Then there are more complicated things, such as the ability to keep a long historical memory, fathom the historical and social scale of every event, and, hence, understand your country and become an active citizen.”

The Summer School of Journalism puts particular emphasis on a journalist’s outlook, while universities put it on the instruments of journalism. How can these be harmonized?

“The point is you don’t have to harmonize anything, for the former is impossible without the latter. I will tell you a story that occurred, so to speak, behind the scenes of the school. Every year the Summer School of Journalism coincides in time with a pottery festival in Opishnia, Poltava oblast. Den is the annual informational partner of the festival – we pay special attention to this really unique project. It is now a tradition that students report on the festival, but it is also a tradition that the Opishnia festival is the school’s chief drama. Why? Firstly, Den has written so many interesting articles on the festival itself and the art of pottery for so many years that one should have a broad vision of the world and an unconventional way of thinking to be able to produce a really interesting article. Secondly, to write a good report, one must gather as much precise and full information as possible, which means being able to use instruments. Very few novices find it an easy task. High-quality journalism needs both the former and the latter.”

What does the current critical situation in Ukraine demand from the future journalists?

“The Ukrainians have been living in a ‘critical situation’ almost throughout their history. I strongly with our generation would manage to lead this country out of the crisis. Yet Oksana Zabuzhko warns in the article ‘The Effect of Moral Corruption’ that a new generation has grown up, which is bound to drop such ‘bombshells’ as the Oksana Makar story (I want to draw the attention of my peers who will approvingly nod when reading this article: it is our generation!). Ms. Zabuzhko is right to a great extent. But our tragedy is that the blame lies with our predecessors, the generation of our parents, to which Ms. Zabuzhko also belongs. It is not enough to state a problem. One should create alternative milieus, such as the Den’s Summer School of Journalism. Besides, I know some people of our generation, who are making Herculean efforts to drag themselves out of this post-totalitarian mud.

“The contemporary Ukrainian journalism needs passionarism, knowledge, intellect, involvement in world processes, interest in real life rather than in politicians, stars, and disasters. There are very many challenges, each of them being difficult in its own way. I am looking forward to the new participants in the Den School of Journalism, who are capable of understanding all this, Den needs reinforcements.”

Yaroslav KOVALCHUK, Ph.D. seeker, University of the Algarve, Portugal; participant in the Summer School of Journalism in 2006, 2007:

“I first got an opportunity to sign up for the Summer School of Journalism in 2006 immediately after completing my second year at the university. Although so many important things have occurred in my life over the past six years – graduation, teaching at a university, working in the Canadian parliament, participating in many youth projects, and traveling abroad, – the experience of working at the newspaper Den remains one of the most illustrious reminiscences of mine. And the point is not in the fact that it was my first meeting with Kyiv, its intensive rhythm of life, its aura, and the breath-taking whirlwind of events, and not even in the fact that, when I was a foreign-languages student, I got an opportunity to try myself in a totally new sphere of activity which I could only dream of before. The main thing is that my journalist internship at the newspaper Den allowed me to feel myself part of the informational ‘kitchen’ and understand that every word you write today will be read by other people tomorrow. It is important that the ideas, which you could only share, at best, with your friends and relatives before, will trigger, at least for a second, a reaction in people totally unknown to you. It is at this very moment that you can see that the words written on paper begin to live a life of their own.

“Another integral feature of the Den’s Summer School of Journalism is numerous press conferences with well-known politicians and academics. It was unusual and, at the same time, extremely interesting to meet the people you had only seen on TV screen before. It is at these press conferences that I could see how much politicians care about their public image, how strangely they respond to ticklish questions, and to what extent their political future depends on the way journalists will present them. It is in this case that you become aware of the power of the ‘fourth branch of government,’ when an individual with a writing pad and a ball pen (now successfully replaced with up-to-date cell phones) can influence, albeit to a limited extent and indirectly, the course of social events in the state. It is the essence of a civil society, when every important event triggers a reaction, while ordinary people, the informational space, and politicians are linked inseparably. Then words cease to be mere words. Anyway, this was the case six years ago, or it is perhaps in this way that a recent second-year student perceived his first meeting with a big city and a new profession.”

Kateryna YAKOVLENKO, student, Donetsk National University; participant in the Summer School of Journalism in 2010:

“It was the invaluable experience of working and mingling with the people who can think. Every dialogue, every interview, and every newspaper assignment would make me understand that Ukraine was in bad need of high-quality journalism which would allow one to reflect on social processes, analyze the state of education, politics, and culture, etc. The debates that came up when Den journalists and we, Summer School participants, met such eminent Ukrainians as Ukraine’s first president Leonid Kravchuk, journalist Vitalii Portnikov, and sociologist Yevhen Holovakha, encouraged us to better understand socially important issues. In my opinion, this kind of dialogues between all the people who are able to think can really develop our society. In addition, the Den school allowed me to meet a lot of good people from other regions of Ukraine, who became my good friends and with whom I am glad to maintain close links. I think they are a generation of the Ukrainians who are making an honest, self-confident, ambitious, and competitive country of their own. The more there are people of this kind, the more successful and confident our country will be, and the fewer mistakes it will be making.”

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