Scenes from Izyum

Here are some photos from last week's trip to Izyum. First, a picture of some of the editors who participated in the workshop:

Izyum is a medium-size city (50,000 pop.) with a nice river and a lot of recreational activities (hunting and fishing -- Virginia's bubbas would feel right at home). Here's the river ...

... which is spanned by a footbridge.

The commercial area is tidy and has a friendly, small-town feel. Here's a photo of a local church:

A visit to the dentist (стоматолог)

A while ago, I chipped a front tooth, and I figured I might as well have it repaired here. Yulia has a good dentist -- she fixed a problem Selma had -- so we made an appointment.

The dental office was set up like a hair styling shop -- an open room with two dental chairs. No hygienists here; the person who works on your teeth is an actual dentist. (This will be a shock to many Americans. In Richmond, I get the feeling that my dentist is more like the honcho real estate broker who has agents doing the grunt but drops by at the end of the process to sign a piece of paper and collect a hefty fee.)

Dr. Lihochas worked on my tooth for about an hour -- it looks and feels great now. The cost: 70 grivni, or $13.84. That's about the price of two tickets to see Michael Moore's "Sicko."

Ukraine at Eurovision: What a drag?

During the Web 2.0 program for Izyum, participants will learn how to embed various online modules (polls from UA Poll Zone, PowerPoint shows from SlideShare and video from YouTube) into their Web sites or blogs. I was looking for a YouTube clip that would catch my audience's eyes, and settled on a much-viewed segment about Ukraine's entry in the recent Eurovision 2007 Song Contest.

Here's what the BBC reported under the headline "Eurovision act angers Ukrainians":

Angry Ukrainian nationalists have held protests against the selection of a controversial drag queen to represent Ukraine in the Eurovision Song Contest.

The demonstrations are part of a campaign to pressure the former Soviet republic to withdraw from the contest.

Verka Serdyuchka, who pokes fun at middle-aged women, is loved by many people and is a cult icon in Ukraine.

She was chosen as Ukraine's entry by an overwhelming majority in a public vote, but some find her vulgar and offensive. ...

View Serdyuchka's performance and decide for yourself whether it's fun or offensive:

Zooming to Izyum, for Web 2.0 training

I am getting ready to give a workshop on Friday in Izyum, about two and a half hours by bus from Kharkiv. The workshop is for the Новини Ізюмщини (Izyum News) newspaper. I plan to cover advanced Internet research skills, introductory spreadsheet skills and a new module I've developed about "Web 2.0" -- fast and free ways to make news Web sites more engaging and interactive.

In the new program, I'll show reporters how to set up blogs, add "insta-polls" and post multimedia content (video, slide shows and so forth).

In prepping for the Web 2.0 training, I'm using Google's Russian-language interface -- because that's what we'll use on Friday. It looks and feels just like the English-language version.

My plan is to have each participant create a blog and populate it with content: perhaps the summary of a news article that the participant has written (with a link to the full article), and maybe a poll.

There are several online tools that will create a poll for you and let you embed it in your own Web site. These tools ask you the question and options that you want in your poll, then spit out some code that you can paste on your Web page -- the same technique that YouTube and SlideShare use.

Here's a poll I just created using a tool called BlogPoll.

Boiko kids beamed with pride ...

... as they distributed Issue #2 of their newpaper, Boiko's Eyes. Yulia and I delivered the copies (200 of the Russian version, 100 of the English version) this afternoon. Then the students raced around the halls and went classroom to classroom, handing copies to students and teachers.

We took some last staff photos. Here's one; you'll find others in a Picasa Web album.



The Boiko School posted Issue #1 on its Web site, and we hope they'll do the same with Issue #2. To find PDFs of the first issue, go to www.boiko.com.ua, and scroll down until you see (on the right-hand side):

Внимание! Внимание! У нас теперь своя газета!
Русская версия>> / Английская версия>>

Or try Google's English-language translation of that page.

Extra! Extra! Students publish 2nd newspaper!

At the Boiko School on Friday, we settled on a lineup of stories for the second issue of the student newspaper (the last issue for this school year). We also discussed which stories should go where:

* Front page: a preview of the "Last Call" musical performance (a show the students put on near the end of each school year) and coverage of the Victory Day observation

* Back page: a feature about the Boiko summer camp, a report from a party featuring a famous Russian DJ and an article about the Boiko kindergarten's fifth birthday party.

Over the weekend, the Boiko students sent me the final drafts of their stories -- in both Russian and English. Yulia and I copy-edited the articles, I did the layout, we proofed the pages and then we took them to the photocopy shop.

This afternoon, we will deliver to Boiko 200 copies of the Russian edition and 100 copies of the English edition. Here's what they look like. If you see any mistakes, keep them to yourself; I don't want to know. ;)

If you want a copy of the newsletter, e-mail me and I can send you a PDF.

Saturday at the zoo

Yesterday afternoon, I went to the Boiko School, where the students were pulling together the stories for the final edition of their newspaper. Some of the students mentioned that today (Saturday), Boiko would be celebrating the fifth birthday of its kindergarten program -- and that the festivities would be held at the Kharkiv Zoo. We agreed that this would make a timely story for the newspaper. One student (Paulina) offered to cover the story; I said I'd take pictures. And that's why you're seeing this:



I also took several pictures of non-human animals, this being a zoo after all. It's kind of a sad-looking zoo: Mmany of the animals clearly have seen better days; they looked hot and uncomfortable. The polar bear cooled off in the moat inside his caged area:



Several of the animals had had babies. Here's a baby brown bear, which was being swatted around from time to time by its mother, trying to show who's boss:





The zoo also has a lot of ostriches, which I see all the time, because their pen is along the fence that I pass by almost every day.

Back from Kherson with pet calendar photos

Kherson is a nice city -- it's on the Dniper River (which we saw) and the Black Sea (which we didn't). It seems that whenever I had my camera handy, there were animals nearby. Here's a cat on a window sill. Its shadow and black stripe make it appear as if it's being hugged by another cat:



And here is a photo of a dog -- a member of a friendly pack of pooches that roamed the central square begging for food from customers eating at outdoor restaurants:



Of course, my purpose for going to Kherson wasn't to photograph animals. Rather, Yulia and I conducted several workshops:

* A computer-assisted reporting workshop for upper-level journalism students at Kherson State University. The facilities were a bit cramped -- four computers in a small room, with two students at each computer. But we covered a lot of ground on Internet searching and spreadsheets -- skills the students don't usually get.

* A civic journalism workshop for first-year journalism students at KSU. We covered not only the principles of CJ but also interviewing skills and lead-writing. We had 17 students, and they were great -- in many ways, far more advanced than my students at VCU.

* Two two-hour "mini workshops" -- compressed versions of the material above -- for the staff at the Новый День (New Day) newspaper. The newspaper sponsors the Kherson Press Club, which is where we met. We had eight journalists present, including two from a sister newspaper called The Keys.

Here is a photo of the university students:

Off to Kherson, on the Black Sea

I am heading to Kherson, a 16-hour train ride south of Kharkiv, to do workshops for two groups: the journalism students at Kherson State University, and the staff of the Новый День (New Day) newspaper.

For both of those audiences, I'll do a workshop on computer-assisted reporting. I've updated the printed and online resources that I'll use for this training and translated the workshop home page into Russian. (This will allow us to move faster, because the participants can click on links instead of typing Web addresses into their browser.)

For the journalism students, I'll also do a workshop on civic journalism. It's the first time we've presented this material since Selma returned to the States. Yulia will be assuming more of a training role as well as a translator role -- so I'm sure it will go well. The only thing I'm not particularly looking forward to is ... 16 hours on a train!

I plan to take pictures and post them when I return, so check back.

Audio slideshow of fireworks

I have been experimenting with different ways for news organizations to present photos. Here's a presentation that includes audio. I did it with a program called SoundSlides -- and it took just 10 minutes. (It took more time to upload than it did to create the slideshow ;)

After the Kharkiv fireworks, of course, everyone broke into singing "The Star-Spangled Banner." Oops, wrong country. OK, so they didn't sing. But I took the fireworks photos, grabbed excerpts of a couple of songs (the first one by Prince, the second by Korol' i Shut, or the King and the Joker, a Russian punk-rock band) and created a 2-minute slideshow.

I can't upload my SoundSlides project to my blog, but if you click here, you can see it. (Be sure to click on the arrow above the word 'Small' to start the show.)

Victory Day fireworks over Kharkiv

Today was Victory Day for Russia and other former Soviet nations, the 62nd anniversary of the victory over the Nazis in the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945 (as World War II is known here).

There were parades and concerts -- and in Kharkiv, a magnificent fireworks display. Serge and I went; it was on Freedom Square, just a five-minute walk from our apartment building.

The fireworks were supposed to begin at 10 p.m. They were about a half-hour late -- but well worth the wait. It was the most spectacular show I'd seen -- better than Fourth of July fireworks over Town Lake in Austin or an Innsbrook in Richmond.

The fireworks started low on the ground, near the Lenin statue -- and I thought, "OK, that's quaint." But then they rose higher and higher -- they could've shot down a couple of planes! -- and ended with a wild finale of colorful bursts.
Of course, pictures -- not words -- are needed to convey fireworks. But I want to present the pictures in a different way than usual.

I recently learned about a site called Slideshare that makes it easy to upload a PowerPoint presentation and then share it with other people. One way to share the file is to embed a link in a Web page (as YouTube lets you do). This interests me a lot, because journalists -- especially citizen journalists -- might be able to use this tool for presenting news photos.

So, with that explanation, here is my slideshow of the fireworks display:

Svyatogorsk lavra & monastery

Yesterday, I went to a mountainside monastery with my friend and landlord Serge, his friend Sveta and her younger daughter Marina. The monastery is called Svyatogorsk, and it includes a lavra (a series of caves), though we didn't get to see that part. What we did see, however, was beautiful: various connected churches and meditation buildings along the Donest River, about a two-hour drive south of Kharkiv.



I couldn't find much online information in English about the monastery. But Serge sent me this link to a Russian-language Web site; and here's the Google translation.

Also in this area is a huge cubist statue dedicated to a 1917 revolutionary hero. (That might have been a not-so-subtle message from the Soviet government about religion: The statue is on a hill overlooking the monastery.)



I have more photos in a Picassa Web album.

The walk up the mountain to the monastery was pretty steep and long (I'm guessing about 5 km). That didn't dissuade a lot of Ukrainian women from wearing spiked heels.