May 17, 2011 I began my journey to Europe for an international media class through CSU. This class gave me the opportunity to travel all over Europe. We started in England, and then made our way to many other countries. These included Belgium, Netherlands, Germany, France and Italy. Later on after my trip I met my family in Rome and we went to Greece and Turkey. The goal of my study abroad trip was to learn about international media in other countries. This ranged from photography, journalism, public relations, TV news stations, advertising agencies, research projects from students and professors and much more. This website is created as part of a project for my class but also as a way to show my family where I went. The way we traveled we had to emerge ourselves into the culture. On the cruise to Italy, Greece, and Turkey it was somewhat superficial going on tours then back to the cruise boat without experiencing what the people and culture were like.
One of the most difficult things we had to deal with was the language barrier. Sometimes we had no idea what menus said, or what items were in the sandwiches at the grocery store, but we all survived. The hygiene standards were also a little lower in Europe. I must say Ive never seen a standing toilet in the US. Despite those minor setbacks the trip was super fun. Here are my top 10 of the funniest things that happened; of course there were a lot more things I could have added.
10. For everybody else me falling on my butt in Belgium
9. Walking into the club and realizing it was a gay club in London
8. Going out in London and trying to pretend we had British accents
7. Getting dressed as Quasey Moto in the bell tower of Norte Dame in Paris
6. Man yelling "like, like, like, like" over and over on the bus at me in Germany
5. The subway video of me sleeping with JoAnnas crazy eyes next to me in London
4. Lauren not knowing how to work a room key after a night out
3. Children singing "Barbie Girl" as I walked down the train aisle in Germany
2. The express train from Amsterdam funny pictures we took of Lauren and I
1. And the funniest thing of course was Lauren getting stuck on the train and used the Hilton umbrella to jam in the door to escape in Germany.
5/17 - Leave Denver for London
5/18 - International Media Studies Program Starts
5/19 - Meet with Jack Starks at Fallon
- Bus Tour of London
- BBC's Television Centre Tour
5/20 - Boat Tour on Thames River to the Tower of London
- Meet with CBS correspondent Charles D'Agata CSU Alum
5/21 - Open "Free" Day-Zoo and Shopping
5/22 - Eurostar to Brussels
- Visit Grand Place and tour city by bus
- Train to Ghent
5/23 - Meet with Jeroen De Keyser
- Train to Antwerp and then Nijmegen, Holland
- Meet with Hans Hoeken and Marian Janssen
5/24 - Nijmegen Seminar at University- New Media in the Benelux Nations
- Dr. Hans Hoeken, professors, and students
5/25 - Nijmegen Seminar at University- New Media in the Benelux Nations
- Presentation with on technical journalism
- Dr. Hans Hoeken professors, and students
5/26 - Open "Free" Day- Airborne Museum and Hike
5/27 - Train to Amsterdam
- Visit Van Gogh Museum
- Meet Anne Ro Klevant Groen at Cream PR
- Red Light District
5/28 - Visit Anne Frank House Museum
- Depart for Germany
- Visit Cathedral in Cologne
5/29 - Laundry Day!
- Visit Martina Kollig and Andre Rauren
- Train a train ride up the river
- Take riverboat to see the castles
5/30 - Hike/Bike on the Mosel Day
5/31 - Train to Mainz
- Frankfurt: Visit German Film Museum
- Visit German Communication Museum
- Visit Hill & Knowlton PR
6/1 - Visit Gutenberg Museum
- Meeting at University of Gutenberg
- Walking Tour of Heidelberg
6/2 - Free Day in Germany
- Hiked
6/3 - Take 5:30 am Train from Heidelberg to Paris
-Visit the Musee d'Orsay
- Watch street performers at
- Visit Moulin Rouge
6/4 - Visit the Musee du Louvre
- Visit Palace of Versailles
- Climb Eiffel Tower
6/5 - Walking tour of the city
- Walking Tour of Notre Dame
- Underground Crypt
- Closing program dinner
6/6 - Program officially ends and extended stay begins, on our own!
6/6 - 6/10 - Extended stay in Italy
- Visit Milan, Chica Terra, Florence, Pisa, and Rome
6/11 - Meet parents in Rome
6/12 - Cruise leaves Rome
6/13 - Arrive in Messina, Sicily, Italy
6/14 - Free Day at Sea
6/15 - Crete, Greece
6/16 - Turkey
6/17 - Athens, Greece
6/18 - Free Day at Sea
6/19 - Rome, Italy, and fly home!
Be home for 3 days then leave for California for 5 days!
The first meeting of the trip was with Jack Sparks at Fallon, the second best advertising agency of the decade. Here we learned all of the different jobs you could do in an agency and what it takes to do each one. He also showed us some of his famous marketing campaigns like with Cadbury Chocolates. One of the main things they do when creating an ad is to catch the audiences attention. The ads often have no relation to the product itself, because they market a lifestyle of the brand and not the product itself. For example they created a glass and a half full production which has nothing to do with the products, but just to bring the consumer a moment of joy. Yet even though the ads dont relate they become viral hits that a viewer cant simply ignore, which generates a lot of free publicity. The meeting was very interesting to learn about what goes on at an agency and also to see the people behind the scenes who come up with some crazy ads. I would love to know how they come up with these crazy ads!
Today I got to tour my first television production studio, or in this case many studios. Anthony and Kitty lead us all over the building that is strangely enough shaped like a question mark. Wonder if that has anything to do since journalists always asking questions. Here we checked out where the news is being researched for stories, and even went to the dressing rooms that big stars like Prince and J-Lo have used. We learned how a green screen works, and they shared with us that the weathermen are actual scientists, and the anchors are actual journalists. We also watched a prescreening of a popular British celebrity game show, and played the weakest link (which I won!). Social media is a very popular tool for BBC. They used it to find out about Michal Jacksons death when a witness Twittered an ambulance just left Michael Jacksons house.
Right when we walked into CBS news there was a breaking news story on a car bomb that Charles DAgata, a CSU alum, was in the middle of putting together. We were able to watch him put together the piece by writing it out, finding clip from the video he wanted to quote and air, record the voiceover, and put it all together. Watching him do this was so interesting as I had no idea a one minute news piece took this much detail. After he completed his piece he sent it to New York and then gave us a tour of the CBS studio.
On the tour there were a couple empty offices. This is because the budgets are getting cut, so much reduced that it went from 6 producers to 2. Now that there are less jobs Charles has to do more work he has to cover all aspects, he has to make the intro, teasers and just basically do it all. Charles started his career in radio (you could tell by his great voice) he then switched to news. His job seems very tough having to travel all the time, stress from the executives and also the work long hours. Overall it was very exciting to see my very first piece of news be created right in front of me
Sadly I arrived to London two weeks too late from stopping the Prince from making a horrible mistake of not marrying me. When I arrived from Colorado I instantly started to see how different Europe's culture was from the States. We saw many famous sights in London. These included Big Ben, Tower of London, London Bridge, London Zoo, London Eye, Westmenster Abby, Regents Park and a bunch more! Not only did we see the sights of London we also visited a few business. These were the famous Fallon, BBC News, and CBS news. I really enjoyed the scones at high tea and took in the experience of vistiting the Britsh pubs.
Brussels: the town that smelled of waffles. Here we saw many chocolate shops on every corner. We also saw lots of graffiti on almost every corner. We only stayed in Brussels a short time but saw a few of the major sights on a bus tour. We even walked outside of where Karl Marx wrote his communism book that changed the world. After a couple hour stop we got back on the train to Ghent where we met Khael Velders and Jeroen De Keyser University of Ghent students who took us out for Geneva.
The Khael Velders and Jeroen De Keyser shared with us some information on Belgium and its culture. Belgium has a system called polarization; this is where you have different pillars in which you were raised. For example, you go to Christian school, Christian medical treatment, and so forth. These pillars are still around but not as important as they used to be. They have certain newspapers according to your pillar. Belgium seems to be a very divide country, there are 3 regions Spanish, Belgium, and Legume. Also two languages French and Dutch, I couldnt imagine the struggle to develop a marketing campaign here. More journalists live here than anywhere else in the world, including Washington D.C. A few media stats on Belgium is only 50% of the population reads the paper, which is less than any other country, and 95% of the people use cable and not satellite. Khael and Jeroens presentation taught me that there is a lot more to Belgium than just chocolate and waffles.
Where communism was created, where Karl Marx creaed the "The Communist Manifesto."
Infamous Gini ad we saw throughout Belgium, finally discovered it was for lemonade
Check our my journal to read more about the University and Cream PR
The Netherlands is a very friendly country the people were just so nice to us. We went from one nice little city Nijmegen, to a completely different city in our experience, we went to Amsterdam. In Nijmegen we visited the Airborne Museum. This is where the largest air battle took place during the war. We toured the red light district and you could really smell the special "coffee" shops. We also stopped by the Van Gough Museum and also where Anne Frank lived during the war, which was a somber reminder about the Holocaust.
Radbound University
Cream PR
The Netherlands
Journal
Photo by Pete Seel
Program Introduction by Dr Hans
-Aim to educate students not as journalist but as a watcher or journalism communication.
-Have an intense only one year program.
-Educate students so they will be able to fulfill an analytical and guiding role in organization.
Organization Magazines by Christine Liebrecht
Do employees commitment increase by organization magazines?
Three types of commitment an employee has with an organization, affective, normative, continuance.
Results: readers of low committed magazines are less committed by the organization than readers high committed magazines.
Arcadias project Lydia and Lennie
Eco-friendly family owned engineering services company
Provide a worldwide magazine: Research question- How is the magazine read and appreciated by the employees?
Research done like this can significantly increase the productivity of the company
International business communication by Margot Van Mulkin
The aim of the program is how to communicate with culturally different organizations.
Want students to know how to communicate on work floor and also with external stakeholders.
They want to explore the aspect of globalization, and role of linguistics and cultural diversity.
L2 use and self-image by Huib Kouwenhoven
International commerce has a need for communication
Language and the brain things conscious or unconscious, how you present yourself when you talk to yourself.
L1-L2 is when one adopts and changes their language from their first language to their second to speak to you.
Role of culture in media choice by Marinel Gerritsrn
Cultures differ in the extent to which they use context and situations for the interpretation of a message.
Culture indeed plays a role in the appreciation of and preference for communication media in cases where employees receive a message.
Communications and Persuasion by Jos Hornikx
Persuasiveness and processing of normatively strong and weak anecdotal evidence in combination with statistical evidence.
Evidence is data presented as proof for an assertion. Anecdotal, statistical, casual, expert evidence.
Different evidence contributes differently to a case.
Effectiveness of CSR communication on the organizational reputation during a crisis by Ilse Giselen
People based what they think about a company based off what is presented by the media
Companies need to be smart and active and talk about what they do. Example is the BP oil spill.
Exemplars in health communication by Kobie
Integrative model of behavioral prediction where there are three determents on behavior intention; attitude, perceived norm and self efficacy
The context of her study was promoting safer sex among students.
Results; Reading text with example led to higher perception of own infected risk, which caused people to overestimate.
Stories and persuasion by Dr. Hans Hoekin
A vital ability when working with a group is social intelligence, the ability to understand, predicts and influence people
Essential capacities we learn through play. Stories are our play material to predict and influence behavior.
The persuader is slightly more effective with a message that uses statistical proof as opposed to exemplars and narratives.
Humans are inclined to give more attention to those who engage our emotions
Scrutinizing fictional characters arguments by Dr. Hans Hoekin
Some models of narrative persuasion are on transportation imagery, extended elaboration likelihood model, and entertainment overcoming resistance model.
Narratives "resist logical procedures for what they mean."
In a rhetorical point of view, the thoughts evoked by an argument are essential
Frank Everaardt, technical communicator
He has no journalism background, he was told just to write an article and that led to his career.
He has a website and a magazine that comes out six times a year.. They have website, magazine, make apps and even a TV show. They make scanners for the iPhone, and now working with Microsoft.
Dutch are one of the main users of Twitter, and cheap broadband here, you can download everything here but not upload.
-Its crazy to think how many millions he has made worth in companies from just trying to write an article
At Crème Pr we met with Anne-Ro Klevant Groen for a PR briefing. Crème PR is a fashion and lifestyle PR company. We walked into an amazing room filled with clothes, shoes, and purses. They work a season ahead so it was a time to take note on what items were there so I know whats in style for winter. Anne is the manager at Crème, she brings new clients in, does PR for young designers, and makes press releases. At Creme they do a wide array of labels from sports, young designers, to normal designers. They lend out clothing for celebrities, TV, media, and celebrity sponsoring. s have grown and became much more well known than three years ago.
Annette the owner started the company 13 years ago in a bus! Now they have two consultants, a freelance journalist and interns for total of 8people and 43 designers. Creme does the PR for a newspaper called Glamcult. Of the 30 PR firms in Amsterdam they are in the top 5. Anne started out by interning at Cosmo, she wrote her thesis on how to make them a better magazine than glamour. She also did some modeling, then worked in the shoe business, and she went to school for journalism. She started out doing scanning, press releases, and filing. She said you need to be flexible in yourself and god at dressing yourself. Photoshop is a good skill and also being able to be a camera person and a journalist all in one. You need to be everywhere in PR, show your face, and do networking. PR firms have grown and became much more well known than three years ago.
Germany was completely different than I imagained. The country was beautiful, the countryside was so green. There were so many small towns in Germany that had the old houses, that were so cute. I would love to come back, despite that most of the population seemed to be over 70. Here we visted the communication musuem, Hill and Knowlton, and a mom and pop company.
The Communication museum has various exhibits pertaining to many different aspects of communication. Right away you could see this as there was a statue of a horse with a robot on the back holding all the different ways of communications you could find once you stepped inside. One display was on how the Nazis used propaganda on the radio to start the war. The radio was nationalized so it was able to generate interest all over Germany. After the war they switched the radio from nationalized to being run by the states to avoid something like this ever happening again. Hitler was a good communicator which is how he rose to fame, the way he said and got his word out there with the people. This is like how Obama became president; he was amazing at giving speeches.There were many other displays in the museum from telephones, computers and even to mail carrying trucks.
After the Communication Museum we went to Hill and Knowlton, one of the top3 PR firms in the world. We met with Udo who does public strategies and learned about the German media landscape. In Germany they have over 350 newspapers, with 10 national dailies and over 3,000 magazines reaching a population of 82.2 million. About 73% of the German population over 14 read the newspaper about once a week. The largest TV market in Europe is in Germany, with 80 national services and dual system of both public and commercial broadcasting.
Only 2% of the population could read before the press was invented. Monks had to hand write out the books, what a miserable job. Books were so valuable that the libraries would chain them to the shelves. Write after the press was invented universities started up. Which lead us to our next location, the Johannesburg Gutenberg University of Mainz. We had a meeting with a professor and a graduate masters student, Karl Renner and Judith Snider. They talked to us about the university of Mainz, their television setup CTV, and their graduate program.
Picture taken by Pete Seel
Martina Kollig and Andre Rauen are a husband and wife team atONX-makopress in Koblenz. It makes up 3companies they own together Orange Network, Makopree.de, and Media 44. She is an entrepreneur and seems to do very well for herself and her family. Her best advice was to do internships and also to network, this is what made her so successful. They have had quite an amount of success despite the current economic situation the past few years.
Bonjour!
Paris, the city of lights. This was my favorite city that we visited during the trip. The French have a reputation for not being friendly towards Americas, but I did not find this to be the case.
Places we visited in France
- Musee dOrsay
- Basilica of Sacré-Cœur
- Moulin Rouge
- The Louvre
- Palace of Versailles
- The Eiffel Tower
- Shakespeare and Company bookstore
- Notre Dame
-Underground Crypt
At the end of the program we went off on our own to Italy. We visited Milan, Chica Terra, Florence, Pisa, and Rome. In Milan we saw the famous shopping center, The Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II. The mall was located next to the beautiful Milan Cathedral, The Duonmo. After Milan we went for two nights to Chica Terra and visited each of the five cities. After leaving Chica Terra with bed bugs we stopped off very fast in Pisa to see the Leaning Tower of Pisa. 30 minutes later we got on a train to Florence to see the Statue of David, which was so amazing. That night we accidently went to a political rally, but made it out alive to leave the next morning for Rome. When in Rome, we saw the Spanish Steps, Colosseum, Trevi Fountains, Pantheon, and a few more historic buildings. The next day in Rome we went to Vatican City. There we saw the Vatican Museum, where the Pope lives, the infamous Sistine Chapel, and St. Peters Basilica. Then that afternoon we wandered around and did some shopping and went to dinner with my parents. Interestingly enough the gay parade was in town with Lady Gaga.
The day we were supposed to arrive in Athens a horrible riot broke out in the city. This was a general strike in response to the debt crisis going on in Greece. Petrol bombs were even being thrown at police so our cruise decided to switch courses and take us to the Greek island of Crete. This was a small little town with a few beaches and an ancient small harbour to buy all the souvenirs you wanted. A few days later we were able to make it to Athens. The city had a tremendous about of beautiful marble, sadly most of which was covered in graffiti.
In Turkey we toured the ancient ruins of Ephesus. It was unbelievable how many ruins in the area there were of ancient Greek and Roman cities. Also there was a tremendous amount of marble in the houses the people used to live in. By this part of the trip I had seen almost enough ruins to last a life time. After the tour we had a couple hours to shop in the famous Turkish bazaars. My dad managed to buy 3 pairs of "Prada" shoes at the market. We were told that these were from the "parallel" market versus the "knockoff" market. Turkey is a secular Islamic country that is working hard to become part of the EU.
Reflections
This trip has given me many memories that I am going to cherish for a long long time. Even now I look through the photos and smile. I thought the trip was put together very well and enjoyed meeting the speakers from the countries. People always want to hear about comparisons with the US and Europe. I really enjoyed traveling around and found it a great experience. There were different things between here and there but nothing to outlandish or unique.
There were a lot of subtle culture differences that sometimes were hard to identify, but none the less we learned to appreciate them. I consider myself very lucky to have this opportunity to travel overseas and I think every CSU student would find it of value. People are eating, living, and drinking to a very nice high standard of living in the countries we visited, in the US we have a tendency to think everything centers around America
Annelise Jorgensen copyright 2011 no animals were harmed in the making
my business copyright 2000 no animals were harmed in the making
