A European Atmosphere

By Emily Brown

After three years of taking classes in the journalism school at the University of Missouri I can tell you one thing I have learned for certain: J-schoolers are a proud and close-knit clan.  We walk in packs to the J-Café for coffee, proudly display Missouri School of Journalism apparel, and can frequently be heard boasting of going to the best school around.  Many critique these behaviors, but I ask why shouldn’t we be like this?  The journalism school at Mizzou, often revered as one of the best in the nation, provides us with a phenomenal education, no matter your emphasis, and offers fantastic opportunities that other majors can only dream of.

One such opportunity is the Europe Tour study abroad program.  Students from each journalistic sequence get to experience the sights and wonders of Europe while getting a taste of daily life and work abroad in their emphasis.  Various visits to media outlets and agencies allow students to not just feel pride in their own major, but also to appreciate all the other sequences that their journalistic comrades are involved in as well.  As a strategic communication major, I was much more enthusiastic about tours and lectures from advertising agencies like McCann-Erickson and public relations firms like Hill+Knowlton, however, upon entering various news outlets and getting the chance to be a fly on the wall for a couple hours gave me more appreciation for my fellow journalists in their respective emphasis areas.

Each agency or news organization was unique with its own characteristics and mannerisms, however, after visiting a handful of places I began to notice a pattern.  Each sequence of work has similarities in the type of people that work there, the speed of duties carried out, and the overall atmosphere.

The Importance of Languages

By Sydney Berry 


If there was one theme that repeated out throughout our entire trip through Europe, it was the huge role language plays in each region, be it political, social, religious or within the media. Each city we visited has a certain representation that I took from it, and I’m going to explore the role language played in each. In Prague, it was social.  In Paris, it was the media.  In Brussels, it was political, and in Rome, religious.

Privacy Across the Globe

By Alexandria Seay

After studying American journalism for four years, it was quite easy to get wrapped up in the culture of the Missouri School of Journalism and to seemingly forget that media can be different in other parts of the world.  The Europe Tour provided thought-provoking presentations that illustrated the various ways the government plays a role in journalism and advertising overseas.  The presentation I found to be most interesting was that of Peter Gumbel, the Director of Communications for Sciences Po. He showed an intriguing multimedia presentation that highlighted differences between French and American privacy laws and their portrayal in the media.  What I once considered to be social norms were not so normal in France.  

Many of the topics covered in the lecture stemmed from the French Civil Code.  Article 9 of the French Civil Code states “everyone has the right to respect for his or her private life” and goes on to define one’s private life as including “his or her love life, friendships, family circumstances, leisure activities, political opinions, trade union or religious affiliation and state of health.”  These French privacy lawss are enforced regardless of whether a person is a public figure or private individual.  As one can gather from this section of Article 9, French privacy laws have a few substantial differences from American privacy laws.  In many cases, the French privacy laws are stricter than those of Americans.

In America, the notion of newsworthiness is a large factor for journalists.  We believe we have a responsibility to inform the people.  Therefore, with this responsibility we often see the exposing of public figures in American media.  However, based on France’s stance on this matter, it is apparent that the idea of newsworthiness prevailing is not a universal truth. Gumbel spoke of the respect for citizen’s private lives, an idea highlighted in the Civil Code.  He gave an example of a public figure running for governmental office, claiming to be a devout Catholic, but having an affair.  There was knowledge of his infidelity amongst journalists, but no one would report on it because this dealt with his private life.  After learning this information, many of the students on the tour had questions.

The Language Barrier

By Kayla Meyers

Hello! Ahoj! Bonjour! Hallo! Ciao!

English, Czech, French, Dutch and Italian. These five are just a taste of the languages that we encountered on our trip to Europe. While I had visited Paris before our trip, I was unsure what to expect in the other three cities, as I had never communicated with people who speak languages other than English, Spanish and French. Personally, I can't speak any language other than English, so I relied on Google Translate to learn key phrases that would help me get by at restaurants and shops, but this barely scratched the surface. After visiting each of the four cities, I realized that each has a very distinct culture that communicates not only verbally, but non-verbally as well.

Delicious treat from Prague.

On our first day in Prague, I started to pick up on some of the Czech body language and communication styles. It seemed as if the locals in Prague were a bit cold to our loud American ways. I felt as if not many of the people that we met knew how to speak English, or at least, very little. However, at McCann-Erickson (an advertising agency), I noticed that some of the commercials we saw had English-speaking characters with Czech captions. This is something I don't commonly see in America - the advertisements are usually always English-speaking characters. The advertisements shown were also able to connect with people other than purely Czech audiences. For example, the Fidorka commercial shown influenced quite a few of us on the trip to visit the supermarket and purchase the delicious chocolate treats. On our free day in Prague, we were able to see more of the culture and experience more of the locals and how they communicate. I still felt a sense of coldness at times, especially when people realized that we were Americans and couldn't speak a bit of Czech, except for the simple "hello", "goodbye", and "thank you" that we had learned from Google Translate.

The Secret Sauce Is There Is No Secret Sauce

By Peter Kampschroeder

This picture to the left sums up what I learned on the trip quite nicely. None of the newsrooms we saw had exactly the same approach, even among exceptionally similar services. There were always subtle differences in how they ran themselves, little niggling differences in what each company focused on. What’s more, all these companies were still experimenting, to try to find a solution to the currently shifting media paradigm that works for them.