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: