Teresina

Letter from Teresina

By Mike Stricklin
News-editorial faculty

Stricklin spent July through mid-January in Teresina, Brazil, on a Fulbright Fellowship. He wrote this reflection on his experiences there in November.

As far as academic and intellectual retooling go, the Fulbright experience has proven to be my ideal sabbatical. This is the first time in years that I have had a relatively unlimited opportunity to read, think and write. I hope the results speak for themselves: two op-ed pieces, three academic articles, a good start on two books, two major public presentations, an undergraduate class that is something like a senior seminar and a graduate seminar on research methods.

Additionally, I participated in many journalism classes, worked on strengthening distance learning opportunities between Nebraska, Piaui and the Federal University in Rio de Janeiro, supported the seven NU students who were in an intensive language and culture class, attended a variety of university-related functions and spoke to several Rotary clubs.

It is hard to compress into a few paragraphs all that I have been doing, so I will comment on a few highlights of the last few months.

— I wanted to write more op-ed pieces but simply ran out of time. The Lincoln Journal Star printed a description of a public ceremony here where streets and avenues were formally named to memorialize deceased residents. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram printed my recollections of Jerry Flemmons, a columnist there who died in September. He was maybe the best reporter and writer I ever worked with. Left unwritten: a comparison of NU and Federal University of Piaui commencements; some observations—as a parent of two vegetarians—on the trend throughout Brazil toward more vegetables and less meat; some observations on why those responsible for infrastructure are never praised: Nobody notices until the sewers back up.

— I was honored to be asked to keynote a series of presentations and debates on the contemporary world situation. It is something like the Thompson Forum series at NU. My presentation, one of 12, was called “Chaos: Knowledge and the Death of a Cliche.” It talked about how a combination of two factors threatens journalism and mass communications professionals.

First, all kinds of people can make and publish new information today. They can produce it and pass it around the world so rapidly that a society based upon individual liberty may have gotten more than it bargained for. National boundaries have little meaning; news cycles are measured in minutes and not hours.

Second, in this uncertainty, even educated people are having trouble knowing what to know and what to ignore. Plus, significantly, judging the value of information in terms of authoritative sources is hardly possible. Titles of two other presentations indicate that my worries about chaos and knowledge may be well founded: “Uncertainty and the Individual” and “Technology and the Illusory Society.” These and the others will make up a book to be published in January by the university foundation here.

In one of the books I am writing, I am trying to connect Jurgen Habermas’ ethics of public communication with day-to-day American journalism. That idea is based directly on reading I did for the chaos and knowledge paper.

— That reading also helped me organize ideas for an adaptation of Daryl Frazell’s and George Tuck’s Principles of Editing. Several journalism faculty here are collaborating to produce this book. There is no editing textbook in Portuguese, although there are some writings on journalism ethics and many “how-to” books on topics like language usage, graphic design, word processing, etc.

Frazell and Tuck, however, distinguish themselves by establishing their guidelines explicitly within a framework of journalism ethics. This dimension is important now for Brazilian journalists, particularly since freedom of the press is only 11 years old. From 1964 to 1988, journalism was heavily controlled and censored by an office of the federal government.

— There is so much to tell, and I hate to shortchange the classes, the speeches or the ceremonies, but, as they say, space is limited.

Let me finish with a comment on the Nebraska students studying Portuguese here. They live with families and have classes from 7 a.m. to noon Monday through Friday. Five are from other colleges, and two are NU news-editorial students—Erin Hansbrough and Scott McClurg.

Since Brazilian social connections are more tightly linked than ours, good news travels as fast as bad. I am glad to report that only good news is coming from the Nebraskans’professors and families. Judging by what they are saying, the Nebraskans have turned out to be great ambassadors. Ah, good news gives such pleasure.

And their Portuguese has improved dramatically.