RUSSIAN/AMERICAN REPORTING EXCHANGE
“America is no longer a
mysterious foreign country for
me. It became a country with
real people and real problems.”
-Tatiana Borisova
From August 20 to September 4, 2006, Downtown Community Television Center (DCTV) partnered with Internews Russia and Internews Network to hold a reporting exchange titled “The Russians Are Coming.”
The exchange transported seven of Russia's most promising, talented and committed young television reporters on a journalistic tour of small towns across the United States. The Russians traveled in DCTV’s Cybercar, a 40-foot-long mobile production unit, which is equipped with a television screen on its side to allow convenient street-side broad-casting. Using the Cybercar screen, the participants showed films they had made about life in Russia to the members of each town they visited. The reporters also met with local residents to engage in dialogue and cultural exchange, including powerful conversations in New Orleans with survivors of Hurricane Katrina. The entire trip was documented on video and the footage will be assembled in Russia for a showing in their home countries.
Downtown Community Television founder Jon Alpert directed the tour. Following the experience, he remarked, "I saw a complete transformation in these journalists. It was actually quite amazing that their opinions about Americans turned out all very positive.”
The Russian reporters who participated in the tour are: Ksenia Cherepanova from Krasnoyarsk, Andrey Fedorov from Irkutsk, Maxim Voronin from Tomsk, Tatiana Borisova from Sergiev Posad, Yulia Karetskaya from Nizhiy Novgorod, and a translator, Olga Kravtosva, from Moscow.
