But will it play in Mongolia? #salzburgacademy
The Mongolian standard, that's what we're calling it today.
Students at the Salzburg Academy are deciding on their lesson plans this afternoon, determining what news stories and concepts can be valuable education for the rest of the world. For their professors and the working journalists here, this process may be easy — or at least make sense. They've seen enough of journalism to approach it from the outside and observe it at a distance.
But for the students, the destination is foreign. They've been on one side of the classroom for all their lives, and now they're going to try the other side. Similarly, on news, the students have been consumers or, if they've had internships, producers to an extent. But standing outside news is a different task. When news and education meet, there's a critical realization to be had: What's valuable information to me may be worthless or incomprehensible to someone else.
Which is why we're applying the Mongolian standard today. The curriculum-planning students have to ask themselves, as vaudevillians did with then-far Peoria, "But will it play in Mongolia?"
The students come from the United States, Argentina, England, Turkey, Uganda, China, and a host of other countries, all removed some from Mongolia. (China's a neighbor, yes, but the major universities are a hike.) At the same time, Mongolia is exactly how far the lesson plans have to reach. One of more than 100 institutions using the curricula, the Mongolian Institute of Radio and TV is waiting. The students have to learn how the reality they've known so far can connect.
In a sense, news consumers around the world struggle these days with the same issue. Sources are shifting; personal news is becoming public matter; local news is increasingly going global and vice versa. Whatever individual realities have been, we've all become students to a changing world. As we live in that world's steady information stream, whether we wake up in Washington, Ulan Bator or even Salzburg each morning, Mongolia and not-Mongolia now come at us in equal measure.
Crossposted with some editing from Salzburg Global E-Media blog.
