ABC News on Campus Team 2010-11

ABC News on Campus Team 2010-2011

The JMSC ABC News on Campus team will provide ABC with content based on stories in Asia that are of interest to an American audience.

• The JMSC-ABC News on Campus Site

The collaboration was highly successful last year and resulted in a number of JMSC students seeing their news reports air on the American network.

This year’s team was hand picked by Rob McBride, a veteran television news reporter, who is also a freelance contributor for Al Jazeera English in Hong Kong.

McBride is also an Honorary Lecturer at the JMSC where he teaches television news production. After a tough round of interviews, McBride selected a team of 17 Master and Bachelor of Journalism students.

“They are a remarkable group of students, from a very diverse range of nationalities and backgrounds,” said McBride.

“We’ve got young journalists from Europe and North America, plus Australasia and of course Hong Kong and China. They really reflect the growing international status of east Asia, with its rich mix of ethnicities. But more than that, this group really represents the depth of experience and technical accomplishment that has come to mark out this post-80’s generation from any other that has gone before.”

The students were chosen on the basis of their language skills in English, Cantonese and Putonghua, proficiency in spoken/written English (as this is the language in which they’ll broadcast), shooting and editing production skills, and their keenness to participate.

The students who have been chosen to participate are (in alphabetical order): Daniel Goodman, Temily Gopan, Holly Ip, Stephanie Kwan, Vanessa Ko, Grace Lee, Kathleen Ngai, Shari Nijman, Lisa Onland, Maha Shah, Richard Schuster, Henry Viiralt, Adrian Wong, Nicole Xu Ke, Heidi Yeung, Alice Zhang Qianye, Carol Zhong.

Heidi Yeung will lead the team with Maha Shah as deputy.

McBride said that picking the team was an extremely hard task as the quality was very high.

“You look through their resumes and you see they’re already widely travelled and have mastered many of the techy skills of the digital age,” he said.

“They bring a great range of experiences to this course, and have arrived here by so many routes, whether through degrees elsewhere, or straight from a period of work experience in rural China or a US city. But however they got here, what they’ve all got is a passion for story-telling and are so keen to get to work. We’re thrilled that this programme lets them do just that.”

McBride has high hopes for the ABC News on Campus Team this year.

“Working in a proper bureau environment, with all the responsibilities, pressures, headaches, and yes, the excitement, that go along with that, is immeasurable in terms of the experience they’ll gain,” he said.

“None of them is the perfect all-rounder, although it has to be said one or two come very close! Some are better in front of the camera than behind it, and vice versa. But hopefully, by the time they emerge from the Campus team, they will all have moved a little further towards that video journalist’s quest to be the complete ‘multi-skiller.’ I’m convinced some future stars of the VJ-ing world are with us, right here in this group.”