"Travis is a professional party lion!" (Tuesday)

Hola from Germany.  Clearly I’m picking up lots of German! Not…

Ahhhhhh sorry I haven’t blogged in a few days!  The days have been very long and the nights have been very late and I haven’t had the chance to sit down and write!

Tuesday my day started off by my hair dryer almost starting on fire!  Hahahaha it was kinda funny…but mostly frightening.  I was drying my hair and I noticed it was A LOT more powerful and a lot hotter than usual…but ya know, no biggie right?  Well then it started smoking….so I turned it off!  Travis said it’s probably because it’s using more watts here or something…oops…. J

We met P Col again for breakfast at 8:30am.  We got to the conference center shortly before 9:30am (we had a lengthy conversation at breakfast).  The first session was at 9:30, but Travis and I decided to skip it and shoot some video.  We shot an introduction for the 30 minute program (highlighting the forum) that we are doing.  When we were done with that a woman approached us.  She works for DADP (I think those are the letters..)  It is a new wire service provider in Germany…they are basically like AP except they focus more on stories about Germany or Europe, news and sports.  She was very interested in letting us use their news feed (wire service) for our programming.  Travis and I decided it would be very cool to have “Euro News” and “Euro Sports” in our newscast to interest some of the international students!  She said it is a very new service (just started June 1), but so far it is working very well.  She said she is almost positive it would be free of charge for us to use since we are a university.  We also told her if they are ever interested in agricultural stories that we could help out and she really liked that idea.  She said they are also looking for interns at their Berlin studio, which would be great for Wartburg students!  She was a great person to meet and we are very excited about the opportunities this could provide!!

After that Travis and I decided we would attend one of the 50+ workshops/discussions.  There were a few that we thought would be interesting, but we chose one about transmedia storytelling presented by a lady from Deutsche Welle.  She defined trasnmedia storytelling as telling one story on many different media platforms by taking a unique angle with the story.  This is something we are trying to do at Wartburg in the communication arts department.  Instead of each media source (newspaper, tv, radio, website) sharing the same story we want each medium to take a different angle with a single story.  For example, Homecoming at Wartburg….instead of each medium covering what happened you would say I want photos and a newspaper article about the parade, video and an article from the football game, and a radio broadcast or story from something that happened during Homecoming week.  Then everything would be posted on the Circuit and our viewers/readers would be more engaged.  Anyway, back to the discussion, it started off a little slow but then she started talking about something Deutsche Welle is doing with transmedia storytelling and it got very interesting.  She said DW started a “websoap” (a soap opera available for free on the internet) to teach people between the age of 16-35 German.  She said textbooks are out of date and that’s not the way people really talk, so they created “Jojo,” the main character in the websoap.  Jojo is a girl who has friends, and  a boyfriend, and she is basically the “normal” teenager/young adult.  The program is entirely in German.  But then they decided to take Jojo to a new level…they created a Facebook page for her where they post pictures and videos and statuses about “Jojo’s” life (but really it’s just someone who works at DW).  The lady said that this way people get to be interactive with the help of social media.  It was very interesting to hear how they talked about what would be happening in Jojo’s life throughout the upcoming season and then they had a photo shoot (in one day) of her and her “boyfriend” at different locations, Christmas, spending time with friends…so that they could randomly upload pictures to her facebook page to make her seem even more real!  It was quite the concept.  I actually got to interview the lady who gave this discussion yesterday (Wednesday).  I asked her about transmedia storytelling and Jojo and we just talked about how social media is changing (or has changed) transmedia storytelling.  It was funny because she was VERY nervous to do a television interview in English, even though she spoke very good English…she did just fine though J

After the discussion we found P Col and got some lunch.  We were all pretty impressed with the lunches we got at the conference.  Travis and P Col both said it wasn’t like what they would feed you at these kinds of conferences.  One day they had lasagna and the other day they had some different kinds of pasta, along with salads, breads and desserts! 

After lunch (we are still on Tuesday here), P Col had the opportunity to be part of a panel discussion, which Travis and I attended.  The topic was “New Professions for New Media? The Challenge of Digital Media for Professional Journalism Education.”  P Col was very nervous to be part of this panel, but he dominated!  He was the best one by far!  One of the other panelists was Tom Tykwer, apparently a very famous film director in Germany, so that was pretty cool!  P Col had a lot of interesting things to say and he was the only educator in the panel, so a lot of people asked him questions and he did really well.

After the panel discussion Travis and I did a few interviews for our highlight program we are going to put together.  First Travis interviewed Salman, the Pakistani radio man.  Next he interviewed a British guy.  The topic of their discussion was that we (United States and England) are educating and producing all these journalists, but jobs are not available.  It was interesting because they were talking about how they should start producing international journalists.  I just thought it was a great topic because I will be a journalist looking for a job next year!

After those interviews Travis and I decided to go back to the hotel for a little bit.  Travis is still doing some producing for KCRG so he had some stories to write and edit….I took a nap J

Around 6pm we met P Col in the lobby of the hotel to head over to a reception at an art museum down the street.  We were only there for a short time because Mr. Betterman (Director General of Deutsche Welle and recent recipient of an honorary degree from Wartburg) took us to dinner (along with a few other people from DW).  Mr. Betterman and P Col and pretty good friends, so it was a good time!  He took us to Petersberg, which is a very famous hotel in Germany.  In the 1960s, Petersberg was used as a residence for high-ranking state visitors and then after closing for a few years it reopened in 1978.  The government purchased it for residence for state guests.  Some people who have stayed at Petersberg include Queen Elizabeth and almost all of the American presidents.  It is up on a hill and it overlooks the Rhine….it was breathtaking!  I got some really good pictures of Bonn!  (P.S. Sorry there haven’t been any photos included in this blog…the internet here is pretty slow, so they wouldn’t upload….check out my facebook when I get back though!)

The dinner was delicious!  It is a very fancy restaurant in the hotel (obviously) and the food was great!  (The wine and champagne weren’t bad either!)  We were at the hotel until midnight!  It was crazy but it was so much fun being at a relaxed (for the most part) dinner where we didn’t have to discuss a lot of business.  It was a great time and definitely a highlight from the trip!!

Oh, and I suppose you are curious about the title of this post....Yogi (a very fascinating man from DW) yelled this at one point ("Travis is a professional party lion!") and I thought it was hilarious....and true! :)


More later!! :)


Shelby*