Norman — Over Google chat earlier this week, Hailey Branson debated whose room was messier with a South Asian journalist.
And Alex Page now has a collection of Bangladesh songs — shared via a Facebook wall post — from the winner of Bangladesh’s version of American Idol.
The question isn’t who won the dirty room square-off — Branson lost — or Page’s critique of her new friend’s song about rain.
It’s what spurred a relationship spanning 12 time zones between Branson, University of Oklahoma journalism senior, and Page, OU journalism graduate student, and a network of South Asian journalists.
Branson and Page, along with four faculty members from OU’s Gaylord College of Journalism and Mass Communication, returned in January from a two-week trip to Dhaka, Bangladesh and Pakistan, where the team taught two workshops — visual storytelling and women’s leadership in the media.
“It was an adventure out there,” Branson said Wednesday during a trip recount to members of the Gaylord College.
Branson and Page were selected from a pool of applicants to accompany Ken Fischer, broadcast journalism professor; Elanie Steyn, journalism professor; Bob Dickey, news director for OU’s student newscast, OU Nightly; and veteran CNN and NBC foreign correspondent Mike Boettcher, visiting professor at Gaylord College for the 2009-2010 academic year.
The trip was Branson’s first tour outside the country, and she said she was hesitant, especially when the Pakistan leg was added later, writing on the blog she and Page maintained during the venture that she waited a day to respond whether she was in or out.
“It certainly wasn’t London … or the Bahamas,” said Branson, who admitted while scrolling through her photos Wednesday that she didn’t tell her parents about the Pakistan addition until the day after her return. “But it was a once-in-a-lifetime thing. And if there’s an opportunity, you should take it.”
And while Page said she has traveled to Europe and Brazil, Asia was a new frontier.
“I didn’t know what to expect,” said Page, who specializes in broadcast and video production. “Maybe I’d get there and they’d still be using film. I didn’t know.”
As Page put faces to the headlines, which told in bold of the terrorism breeding in Pakistan, she reworked her generic view of the country and its people.
“It’s important to understand that even though the media shows them in a bad light over here, they’re people just like us,” Page said. “Just like we don’t make the decisions of our government to do the things it does, they don’t make the decisions of their government to do the things it does.”
The workshops are part of a six-year project at OU, funded by the Citizen Exchange Program of the U.S. State Department. Nearly 200 South Asian journalists, which currently include journalists from Bangladesh, Nepal and Pakistan, have been trained in Norman and their home countries.
This was the first time the college sent students overseas for the exchange program, an idea borrowed from Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times when he enlisted a search for a student to accompany him to Africa, Gaylord College Dean Joe Foote said.
“You can’t really report on the world if you only have one viewpoint,” Branson said of her altered global perspective. “Be curious. That’s the biggest part of our job.”
Nanette Light 366-3541 nlight@normantranscript.com
