We concluded our four-week whirlwind educational tour of France and London with a celebration cruise down the River Thames. Click on each to enlarge.

Meanwhile, to parents who follow this blog: Thanks for lending your students to our college's study-abroad program led by Dr. Mike Weigold. We were very fortunate to have come to know so many wonderful young people. They prove the future is very bright.

Ethics students on Wednesday 28 May saw the gold standard in broadcasting: the BBC. 

Part of what makes the BBC distinctive is its global scope. It began in 1922 at the zenith of the British Empire, and thus was born with an international scope. Unlike U.S. media, which tend to presume an event is news only if an American is involved, the BBC covers the world simply to help people know about it.

A second part of what makes the BBC distinctive is its financing. In the United Kingdom, the “Beeb” is financed by a licensing fees pay by television owners. It is supported neither by advertising nor by state subsidies. It is financed by its viewers.

A third and perhaps most important distinctive is the BBC arose out of a belief that broadcasting is a public service. We saw a Latin inscription in the BBC Broadcasting House that proclaims its public service mission.

By comparison, the United States has always seen broadcasting as a corporate good. Broadcasters pay nothing for the right to use a scarce resource, the public airwaves. They’re supposed to provide a public service in exchange for that broadcast license, but bare-boned newsrooms and dubious declarations that children’s cartoons constitute “educational” television challenge that narrative.

The tour offered a meaningful look at the BBC newsroom, a fancy new 24/7 facility created just two years ago. Journalists from radio, TV and the Web work in the same large newsroom but largely focus on their own platforms.

The BBC still devotes considerable resources to radio — and not just news. It also hosts live radio shows and radio dramas.

Tour participants can try being a news reader or weather presenter, and reading a radio script or supplying sound effects. For our students, the TV set revealed that reading a live script is harder than it looks while the radio studio brought out the hams.

Along the way, students also heard a re-creation of a World War 2 broadcast when the BBC Broadcasting House was bombed, saw the original microphones used for the first national radio address by the king and saw a rooftop memorial for broadcasters killed in the line of duty.

Only 25 people can go on a tour at a time, so our group of 40 was split into two groups. The group I was in had Stephen and Debbie as tour guides, and they were excellent. It would appear the BBC is also the gold standard for informative, hands-on tours. 


(Click on each image below to enlarge.)

Students today are so drenched in pop culture, nourished by mass media, that they don't realize that it wasn't always so.

On Tuesday, 27 May, we learned about one of the most important progenitors of modern pop culture: The Beatles.

We split into four groups, each led by a tour guide who walked us through some key Beatles sites, and in the process, helped us understand how the Fab Four influenced culture.

Our group's guide, Richard Porter (the author of a book on the subject), showed us locales ranging from Abbey Road to the art studio where John met Yoko.

But he also put the Beatles in larger contest. He showed us how the Beatles and contemporaries turned Carnaby Street into a haven of "mod" fashion that changes how people dressed the world over. He showed us a 1991 mural inspired by the 1978 (correction: 1967) Sgt. Pepper album cover and how it reflects the enduring influence of the band. And we saw how London was, at the time, the most important locale for any rock 'n' roll musician -- and its critical role in the creation of the pop culture we take for granted today.

(Click on each image below to enlarge.)

Stonehenge, a head-scratching array of stones a couple of hours from London, is one of the world’s great sites. That is, if you can see it.

Unfortunately, when we visited on Friday 23 May, a windy rain storm made Stonehenge more of an ordeal than a pilgrimage. Most students braved a look and a photo before returning via tram to the visitor center, where shelter and warm food awaited.

The new visitor center does a great job of helping people visualise how the stones got to Stonehenge and what they might mean. The key here is “might.” No one can say for sure what it all means. 

After Stonehenge, we made a detour to Salisbury, which has a magnificent cathedral from the 1200s. The church is one of Europe’s most beautiful. It is also home to the best-preserved of the four known copies of the Magna Carta, one of history’s most important documents.

So from an ancient stone circle to an ancient document, we caught a glimpse into Britain’s remarkable past.

The journalism classes that Dr. Johanna Cleary and I teach were very lucky (shoutout to UF’s Sixtine Gurrey!) to score a visit on Wednesday 14 May to one of the world’s most prestigious news organizations, Le Monde.

We were lucky to have a gracious host in Brigitte Billiard, who with colleagues provided a brief history of the newspaper and smaller-group tour.

And we were doubly lucky to hear from two distinguished journalists who devoted an hour of their time to answering candidly questions from our students. 

We heard from Gilles Paris, a longtime foreign correspondent who will soon move to Washington to cover the United States for Le Monde, and from Alexandre Lechenet, who works on the newspaper’s growing website and data journalism projects.

Ironically, we came to Le Monde just minutes after it made news itself: its first female editor, Natalie Nougayrede, resigned in what Reuters described as a power struggle with top editors, seven of whom resigned last week.

Some of the struggle apparently was embodied by the two journalists we heard from: can print and digital cultures merge? More to the point, can print play second fiddle to digital?

Gilles and Alexandre think so. They described how print — though very strong — is becoming a niche product in comparison to the enormous digital audience. Le Monde offers a basic level of news for free; subscribers get more content and no advertising.

Like elite newspapers worldwide, Le Monde is trying to retain its distinctive journalism in a digital world. We saw its Web operations, its video studios and the graphics department that now produces animated videos — in this case, about the upcoming World Cup. Those who used to draw maps just for the print edition now create graphics for the website, too.

The culture is adapting. And throughout, we saw people who care passionately about accuracy and excellence.

As Gilles and Alexandre explained, the audience is not always so charitable. French people accuse journalists of falsifying information and of taking orders from politicians. Although such cynicism is not new (media bashing is, after all, an international sport), it is growing worse as France’s economy stagnates and stumbles. The French fear their country is slipping, which is provoking general angst at all institutions. (Politician took a real beating in the April elections.)

Yet amid all the grumbling, the Le Monde online audience continues to grow significantly. So while readers and viewers may complain, they still depend on Le Monde for news and information. That’s the best compliment anyone can pay a journalist.

Lessons like what we learned at Le Monde are part of how a study-abroad program can open the classroom to the world — or, in this case, the news organization named The World.

Because of rain, we’ve only had two sunsets so far. One of those was spent at the Louvre pyramids. When the evening weather broke on Tuesday 13 May, I hurried to the Eiffel Tower. Inspired by college shutterbug Steve Johnson and the very capable Ryan Jones, I’ve yearned to do what I failed to do in 2009: Capture the international symbol of Paris at twilight. (Click on each image to enlarge.)

Dissatisfied with the royal palace in Paris that would become the Louvre, the Sun King decided to transform his family’s hunting lodge out in the boonies into the world’s most sumptuous palace and branded it, “To all the glories of France.”

This was no advertising hype. Three centuries on, Versailles is still the embodiment of grandeur and power. The longest-serving monarch delivered on his promise to signal to the world that France was really something.

We learned much about Versailles during a guided tour on Tuesday 13 May — about King Louis’ savvy management of palace intrigue, how the king rarely had a private moment away from the nobles and favor-seekers, the discreet auxiliary palaces for paramours, queens delivering babies as a standing-room-only crowd watched in a show of pre-Internet transparency, French artwork that “improved” on (read: plagiarized) the Italian masters. and a dizzying array of intermarrying cousins. No reality show could match it.

Although we were joined on the tour through the main palace by a few million of our closest friends (making the Louvre look like a ghost town), our guide Muguet made the Chateau personal. We’re really lucky on this trip to have had some terrific guides who provide an educational experience few classrooms can match.

After touring the Chateau, we were free to tour the grounds at our leisure. The Sun King wanted finely sculptured gardens that would show his supreme mastery by bending nature to his divine will. He succeeded, thanks to a few thousand servants.

Today those “servants” expect to get paid, so Versailles is extracting more cash from tourists. When I took a day trip here in 2009, touring the grounds and the two smaller palaces (the Grand and Petit Trianons) were free. Today it’s 8 euro to tour the landscaped gardens and another 10 euro to see the Trianons. C’est la vie.

On Friday 9 May, our students got a private tour of the Louvre, the most-visited museum on the planet.

People know the Louvre for the Mona Lisa (and then ask, “What was that all about?”) and Winged Victory (currently away getting a bath) and roughly a hundred millions pieces of art in a seemingly endless array of hallways and staircases. Whew!

Thus, having a guided tour was a real treat for our students on this year’s study-abroad program for the UF College of Journalism and Communications. We split into five groups to make the tour more personal.

The guide in my group, Joseph, was exceptionally helpful. He explained that Venus de Milo (a statue of Venus found at Milo) is famous not merely for her age but also for her subtlety. Her torso is twisted slightly. She isn’t a straight, smooth figure. And she’s not a “strong” figure with forceful lines. Instead, she’s subtle.

So, too, is Mona Lisa. Joseph said that Leonardo da Vinci smudged the edges of her lips so we could not tell if she is smiling or smirking. Likewise, the lines around her hair are soft. The artist is using subtlety.

I went back to the Louvre two more times over the weekend, on a Paris Museum Pass. I noticed lots of things I had not seen in my four visits in 2009. Even after seven visits in total, I have not seen it all.

Too, the Louvre is changing. Its new Islamic Art exhibit is terrific. And whenever the Louvre updates space or puts in an exhibit, it puts a few signs in English and Spanish rather than only using French.. The Louvre is going global.

After letting students have our Tuesday arrival day to work out jet lag, study-abroad began in earnest Wednesday 7 May with a morning orientation presentation and an afternoon bus tour of Paris, our classroom.

Our tour of Paris begin with the iconic Eiffel Tower, which we saw from a beautiful vantage point across the Seine. When the tower was erected 125 years ago, it was considered an eyesore and supposed to come down after 20 years. Today it would be hard to envision Paris without it.

Our group is so large (102 students plus 9 faculty and staff) that it takes three buses to haul us around. Each bus had a licensed tour guide who explained the history of Paris and France while pointing out some of the key sights.

We learned about the Sun King, how the French created the guillotine as a more humane execution method, how the French revolution went awry multiple times, what “Les Miserables” has to do with French history, how Napoleon liked to erect monuments to himself, and how Paris has remained a timeless city of nearly 9 million people in the metropolitan area. 

Oh, and we saw where “Charade” with Audrey Hepburn and Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris” were filmed and learned how the French are prone to hypochrondia. 

Formal classes begin Thursday. But really, our classes happen every day. Sometimes students get planned educational outings such as the bus tour, and which will continue Friday with a visit to the Louvre and next week in Versailles. Sometimes the learning comes when students venture around Paris to tour the Opera House they saw from the outside today or interact with locals while doing projects. The entire city is the classroom. (Click on individual pictures to enlarge.)

My first objective upon landing in Paris on Tuesday 6 May (the European date style) was to see the city from atop the Montparnasse skyscraper. Parisians reportedly hate the ugly thing but it's the only tall building in central Paris and offers a great vantage point -- for a fee (14.50 euros). The intermittent rain proved a blessing, as the photos show. Click on the individual pictures to enlarge them.