montanajournalism Dean Abramson, Feature, J-School, Student

Missoula to Berlin Update: May 26, 2016

photo shows MT journalism students walking down a sidewalk.
The group explores their new neighborhood along the Landwehr Canal in Kreuzberg ,Berlin.

They came by plane and by train and by foot, a dozen and a half of them, carrying bundles and suitcases and keepsakes, looking tired but relieved to have arrived in Berlin. No, these are not refugees, they are UM Journalism students, 18 of them, here on a study-abroad trip for the next three weeks. The disorientation many of them feel will be helpful as they begin to meet and study the challenges facing thousands upon thousands of refugees who made their way to Germany. The refugees’ goal is to escape war and find peace. The students’ task, a bit simpler, is to produce a series of articles about how the refugees adjust to their new situation.

The students are staying in a neighborhood called Kreuzberg, which has long been a crossroads for immigrants to this country. For decades, it was home to the Turks who came here during a big labor shortage in the 1960’s and 70’s, and helped Germany recover from war and become Europe’s strongest economy. Once Kreuzberg was a ghetto, but it has turned into a multicultural experiment, a mixing bowl where no one stands out as an outsider. As students are learning, many new refugees are finding their way back to this neighborhood. Kreuzberg has resisted the commercialization that has seized much of Berlin since the reunification of Germany in 1990.

Since the refugee crisis spiked last year, things have calmed down quite a bit, and the number of new arrivals has dropped dramatically. But as one pro-refugee activist told students today, refugees face months or years of adjustment as they come to grips with their new lives in Germany, and learn whether or not they can stay and prosper. Our students will begin to chronicle that adjustment, with articles appearing in this space and elsewhere in the coming weeks. Stay tuned.

By Larry Abramson
montanajournalism Awards, Feature, J-School, Montana Kaimin, Student

Dogged Reporter, Peregrine Frissell Wins Hearst Award For Athletic Investigation

Montana Kaimin web editor and reporter, Peregrine Frissell, had never written a sports story before when he started investigating UM’s controversial compliance efforts with NCAA regulations this past October. After being published in the Kaimin on November 4th, 2015, his story, “Unsportsmanlike Conduct,” won 7th in the Hearst Awards competition for Sports Reporting.

photo of Peregrine Frissell holding a small monkey.
Frissell takes a moment to pose for a photo while reporting abroad in Nepal. Photo by Peregrine Frissell.

“Peregrine did a great job of looking at athletics on the UM campus beyond just the scoreboard,” said Nadia White, faculty advisor to the Kaimin. “His story looked at NCAA rules and regulations and examined what those mean for student athletes.”

Frissell’s research involved digging into those regulations and interviewing UM athletic officials and the NCAA representatives to whom they report any infringements. Violations included anything from coaches recruiting high school athletes too aggressively to convictions of current athletes who commit off-the-field incidents. Frissell said talking to public representatives of those departments was challenging because they wanted to keep control of the information they told him during interviews.

Kevin Van Valkenburg, the fall 2015 Pollner professor and advisor to the Kaimin, said, that a lot of journalists would have dropped the story when they heard officials use the term ‘minor infractions’. “Don’t let the administration convince you it’s no big deal. Ask the right questions,” he said. “UM mis-reported and mis-understood the facts, but Peregrine understood the bigger picture here, and he pursued that to explain it in context.”

“I needed every minute I got,” Frissell said, since he only had two weeks to get the story to print. “I’m really thankful to get recognized.”

Yet Frissell has plenty of reporting experience, both in Montana and abroad. He’s been a Global Leadership Initiative fellow at UM and completed studies in the UK and Thailand, as well as working as a reporting intern for the Nepali Times. “I arrived a month after the earthquake and spent much of my time outside of Katmandu, covering earthquake recovery,” he said. “The earthquake was tragic, but I enjoyed my experience there.”

Back on the UM campus, Frissell has worked with the Montana Journalism Review (MJR) as both an editor and a reporter, and he’s now pursing political stories on the Crow Indian Reservation in Montana as part of the class Native News.

“Peregrine is a dogged reporter. He’s critical and curious, and his instincts are spot on,” Nicky Ouellet said. As a graduate student, she’s overseen his work at MJR and now for Native News. “He’s the type of reporter an editor hopes for—capable of following a tip to create a deeply reported and contextualized story. I’ve enjoyed working with him and can’t wait to see what he pops out in the future.”

Scheduled to complete his journalism degree in May, Frissell said he wants to report in the US for a couple of years and then go back abroad. “I’m still waiting to hear back about potential jobs and internships,” he said.

However, Van Valkenburg has high hopes for Frissell’s future. “He reads a lot and is interested in things of public interest and importance,” he said. “Peregrine will make a great investigative reporter.”

Catch the latest news updates with Peregrine Frissell via Twitter.

By Jana Wiegand
montanajournalism Awards, Feature, J-School, Student

J-School Student Awarded Study Abroad Fellowship

Autumn Barnes-Fraser traveled to Germany for the first time between high school graduation and University of Montana orientation. Despite the nearly 5,000 miles between her hometown of Helena, MT and Berlin, Germany, “As soon as I hit the tarmac, I knew I had found home,” she said.

photo of Autumn Barnes-Fraser

Now Barnes-Fraser will be going back to Germany two more times, as part of the Missoula-to-Berlin International Reporting course at the J-school and for the Congress-Bundestag Youth Exchange (CBYX) program for young professionals. The CBYX program is a public diplomacy fellowship funded by the U.S. Congress and the German Bundestag and covers most of the participants’ expenses.

Barnes-Fraser found out she won the CBYX fellowship on March 7th, 2015, about a year after submitting her written application and successfully passing the interview process. The notification left her both ecstatic and dumbfounded. “I get to live in a culture that I love so much, and in a country that I feel so close to,” Barnes-Fraser said.

“Only 75 people across the US get this thing—that’s a big deal,” Associate Professor Henriette Lowisch said. “Passion and dedication are really a thing, they will get you where you most want to go. Autumn has just given us proof of that by winning this very competitive fellowship.”

Lowisch has worked with Barnes-Fraser as part of the Missoula-to-Berlin reporting project. The project’s goal is to document Germany’s response to the refugee crisis while teaching students journalism skills for reporting abroad, in a breaking-news setting. In the fall, students focused on fundraising efforts for the trip, but now they’ve started pitching story ideas.

“Autumn is one of the leaders of our Missoula-to-Berlin reporting project,” Lowisch said. “She’s put in an amazing amount of time and energy, not only for her own sake, but to make the entire team succeed.”

Dean of the UM School of Journalism, Larry Abramson, who is co-leading the trip, agreed with Lowisch.

“Autumn has a special link to Germany, and her passion for our trip to Berlin is evident in her class participation,” Abramson said. “It’s great to see her developing that passion through this trip, and I have no doubt that her coverage of the refugee crisis will be unique.”

Barnes-Fraser said the diversity of students in the class enhanced how they researched and reported their story ideas. While her double major is in Broadcast Journalism and German, others students have majors in Economics, Political Science and Business. “We all have different interests and different experience levels, so I think we’ll work really well together as a team,” she said.

A month after Barnes-Fraser returns to the States after the Missoula-to-Berlin trip, she will leave for the year-long CBYX program, which is divided into three parts: language immersion, semester studies and a five-month internship. She hopes to focus both the studies and internship on radio journalism. Both NPR Berlin and Deutsche Welle radio stations would offer her the opportunity to report in German, then produce pieces in English.

“I like the local perspective,” she said.

Based on her experience, Barnes-Fraser said locals are usually more willing to talk with foreign reporters who make the effort to communicate in their native tongue. Personally, her favorite journalism pieces relate to human features and long narratives.

Despite the fact that she won’t know where she will be interning until a few weeks before the CBYX trip starts, “I’m excited because of the flexibility and not knowing exactly what will happen.”

Stay up to date with the latest Missoula-to-Berlin news via their Facebook page.

By Jana Wiegand