By Allyson Mann
Three down, eight to go.
Taking a pause in early March from a six-month, 11-country tour, journalism professor Lee Becker reflects on the success of the first leg of his trip.
 “The travel so far has been strenuous, and we have a lot of work to do,” he says. “But it’s gone really well.”
Becker, director of the James M. Cox Jr. Center for International Mass Communication Training and Research, has traveled to the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary so far and will visit Romania, Moldova, Poland, Ukraine, Russia, Chile, Peru and Ecuador before unpacking his luggage for good in June. His travel, funded by a $200,000 grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, is taking the center in a new direction--not to mention racking up frequent flier miles.
An active facility for training international journalists since its founding in 1990, the Cox Center is broadening its scope to include evaluation of journalism-training programs. The first project is Becker’s in-progress assessment of the Knight International Press Fellowship Program, which sends journalists abroad each year to conduct on-site training. Becker and post-doctoral fellow Pat Priest are conducting interviews to assess the Knight Fellows’ impact on attitudes, behaviors, careers and organizations.
“We’re looking at the extent to which curricular offerings at some of the leading on-site training institutes were changed by the availability of the Knight Fellows,” Becker says. “We’re going to look at test cases of newspapers where Fellows gave advice in specific areas, such as design, to see what impact that had.”
After submitting his report to the Knight Foundation this summer, Becker will use his findings to plan future Cox Center training workshops, of which there are about three a year. Two were held last fall in Fiji and Ecuador, and Becker will conduct a third in Latvia this spring while Priest continues the Knight Fellows evaluation in Poland.
It seems likely that Becker, who prefaced the Knight Fellows marathon trip with two weeks of lectures in Switzerland, would have planned to spend spring break at home. But his habit of maximizing opportunities is in evidence here as well: spring break was spent in London, where he conducted an interview for the Moldova evaluation.
At home, Becker plays host to international journalists. Last year the Cox Center conducted two day-long programs for journalists from North Africa and the Asian republics of the former Soviet Union. The center also has been temporary home to visiting scholars from Germany and Argentina.
And, somehow, Becker still finds the time to teach undergraduate and graduate classes and work on research projects--including an annual survey of journalism graduates conducted since 1964. The satisfaction he gets from the Cox Center programs is well worth the breakneck pace, according to Becker.
“I’ve found it really rewarding because the people who have been involved in these programs get a lot out of it, too,” he says. “Anytime you’re doing a workshop, the so-called teacher and the so-called student each have expertise, and the teacher should be learning as well as the student.”
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