Wednesday with a side of Thursday

My week was relatively uninteresting for these two days, so they get a combined post.

Class on Wednesday at Café Belga consisted of the pitch of our stories (mine focusing on the price of tap water in Belgian restaurants--why there is one in the first place) and our European Union quiz. That quiz was much harder than anticipated. Gareth said he'd grade somewhat generously, but that doesn't mean that I did well. Afterwards we spent a lazy Wednesday afternoon. Brandon went downtown, Nicole and Lizzi went to les Étangs d'Ixelles, and I shopped around on Rue Louise for souvenirs. Didn't find anything worthwhile, though.

And that was Wednesday.

Thursday we visited David Rennie, foreign correspondant for The Economist and James Neuger of Bloomberg News. While their lectures were interesting, they certainly opened my eyes to the stark fact that journalism as we know it (the parts that might have been most interesting to me) are dying. There is practically no such thing as a foreign correspondant anymore because no company wants to pay the price of sending staff abroad, paying for housing and transport and family fees like children's education, etc. In addition, reputable companies like CNN want to conduct foreign interviews via Skype. I find this really funny since for Invisible Children's The Rescue, CNN decided to cover how innovative we were using Mogulus (the live feed), Twitter, and FaceBook to keep our tens of thousands of people all connected at all times. Looks like they decided to try their hand at the world of technology as well.

Bloomberg is pretty interesting, me not knowing anything about the company itself. Originally just a stocks report, it graduated into market + news and it's fascinating how efficient it is! However, that showed me that the only security in journalism is in business. Business and I don't get along. I don't mind the lack of job security, but I don't like that those insecure positions are no longer insecure, they're simply endangered on the brink of extinction.

Awesome.

And then we went back home to try and get going on our articles. We had interviews to conduct and research to do. And we were going to be gone the entire weekend, so we had no other time than Thursday afternoon.

The end.