Meet the Pro's Event at Westchester Community College
The Pulitzer Center, an organization
who reports on crisis throughout the world, visited Westchester Community
College on April 26th 2013. The Pulitzer Center organized an event,
Meet the Pros, where two journalists shared their stories and discoveries of
being a journalist.
Allison Shelley, the first speaker
talked about how started working at the Washington Post, but then eventually
followed her real passion of becoming a freelance journalist. When Shelley
became a freelance journalist, she started traveling the world to find
undiscovered stories that she could tell. Shelley, as a photo journalist, began
to follow the way women were treated in other countries. She visited Haiti and
India, and Shelley discovered that these two different regions with different
languages and cultures shared one similarity, the lack of women’s rights. She
followed a couple of women in Haiti that went thru difficult, and almost,
deadly pregnancies. And she took note that, in Haiti there aren’t many medical
advancements, because it’s a third world country, so why would there be
equality for women? When Shelley was in India she discovered something
different, she took notice to the way women were mistreated for having a
menstrual cycle. Shelley said the girls were forced to sleep in pens with the
animals, because in the Hindu culture they consider a female on her menstrual cycle
as “worthless”. During the Q&A session Shelley said “Journalists report on
stories to tell. They don’t have a solution for what they see, that a part of
the job”
On the flip side, Melissa Turley,
the second journalist to speak, spoke about her discoveries in South Africa.
Turley said “she wanted to find the true narrative to South Africa.” Turley received
a grant to report on her topic, for weeks Turley researched South Africa, and
the only way she could tell this story was by experiencing its atmosphere. What
Turley found, like Shelley, was that women didn’t have rights. Turley said she
spoke to women who said there was rape, sexually transmitted diseases and no
laws to protect women. During Turley’s trip she found the true narrative to
South Africa, it wasn’t as prosperous and changed as the media portrayed it to
be. She revealed the truth and current position of women’s rights in South
Africa.
After the event, there was a Q&A
session with the journalists, where students could interact with them and ask
questions. The Meet the Pros event, all in all, motivated communication
students to be passionate about storytelling, and that one day they could
possibly uncover a story of their own.
-Caroline
Lukaswitz, for Westchester Community College
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