The Pacific staff
Website editor/designer
Harry Mok
Reporters
Marc Albert
Matthew Bell
Terry Chea
Ahmad Coo
Lillian Liang
Harry Mok
Carolyn Ann O'Keefe
Anne Senges
Michael Yue
Julie Chen Zhu
Faculty advisers
Bruce Gilley
Robert Templer
Both sides of The Pacific
Aspiring journalists with an interest in covering news outside of the United States could do worse during their time at journalism school than to abide by the slogan "think globally, act locally."
In our spring term of the class Reporting on Hong Kong here at the UC Berkeley journalism school, students have fanned out across the San Francisco Bay Area to report locally on Hong Kong stories. The people, the traditions and customs, and the daily life of the Bay Area's diverse Chinese community have provided the students with ample opportunities to hone their skills in reporting on this distinct and colorful culture in preparation for their end-of-term trip to Hong Kong itself.
It
has been my pleasure to oversee their reporting and writing. The first
assignment was an impressionistic story of some place with a distinct
Hong Kong link. These "sights and sounds" stories covered the gamut of
locales – from Asian brothels to
wet markets, from Cantonese churches to
Hong Kong-run garment factories. We have
selected four of the pieces here, although many merited inclusion in the
magazine.
The second assigment was a profile of a Hong Kong person in the Bay Area. We have chosen four – profiling an artist, a cook, a feng shui master, and a politician – to reflect the diversity of the pieces.
The students have also reported issue-based stories as their final assigment and will turn in more stories from their trip to Hong Kong. It has been a successful term of reporting on and learning about Hong Kong right here in the Bay Area.
We hope these selected stories are as fun to read as they were to write.
Happy reading!
Bruce
Gilley
Visiting scholar,
Graduate School of Journalism
Hong Kong correspondent, Far
Eastern Economic Review