Week 3: April 3 – April 10, 2016
This week I traveled to Rome, Italy for the first time & then, headed to Perugia for the International Journalism Festival to give a workshop with my fellow fellow Christine.
My Saturday night through Tuesday morning was spent being extra touristy in Rome (checking out the Vatican, Colosseum, St. Peter’s Basilica, the Pantheon and the ruins). I’ve never traveled anywhere completely alone, so this was a first for me. It was really amazing to see the city (I highly recommend going) and soak in some history for a few days before heading to the conference. It was breathtaking to see everything.
After Rome, I headed to Perugia for the conference through Sunday, April 10. On Friday, Christine & I presented the grammar of graphics (ggplot2). Here’s our presentation in case you want to check it out! We were hoping to actually do it as a workshop, but the room was set up with chairs for a panel, so we ended up doing more of a panel talk, rather than hands-on.
During the conference, I met a lot of people from European newsrooms and spent my time just getting to understand what they do in their jobs and thinking about stories. I went to a few interesting panels on women in the media, observational journalism and developing sources. I really enjoyed this conference, not just because it was in such a beautiful, picturesque town, but also because I got the chance to talk to and meet people that I would normally not meet at conferences in the U.S.. I also got the chance to talk through my personal project on on-boarding processes and thinking about institutional knowledge retention (more on that in later posts). Meeting up with prior OpenNews fellows was also awesome.
One thing about the conference: I was always so full because of the 3 or 4 course meals that we had for lunch and dinner. The food was amazing, but man, that was a lot of food in such a short amount of time!
Since we were speakers at the conference, we also got the chance to go on tours in region of Umbria. We got to enjoy truffles, go into the mountains of Umbria, and learn more about the amazing city that the conference was in. We were also promised a donkey ride, but unfortunately it was really cold that day, so instead we posed by a donkey statue as one does.
Here’s a few pictures from my time in Perugia.
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