Frank Michael Russell

Brazil: Globalization, Digital Media, and a Nation's Olympic Challenge

In an increasingly globalized world, rapid economic growth has brought attention to four BRIC countries: Brazil, Russia, India, and China.  While these countries have been grouped together since a Goldman Sachs report on emerging economies in 2001 (Lemann, 2011), they each have their own cultures, politics, and financial strengths and weaknesses. 

Brazil will take its place on the world stage in the next few years as host of the soccer World Cup in 2014 and the Rio de Janeiro Summer Olympic Games in 2016.  The country—South America’s largest both by population and land size—will have a chance to show whether it has matured into a major Latin American and global power.

Storytelling in the Digital Age: ‘Being There’ with Kapuściński and Herodotus

In Travels with Herodotus, Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński alternated between two compelling narratives—passages from Herodotus’ The Histories, culminating with the tragic conflict between the Persians and the Greeks, and his own travels as a foreign correspondent in India, China, and countries in Africa. 

Although separated by many centuries, Kapuściński and Herodotus used journalistic approaches to crafting narrative text.  Their stories took on a dramatic, cinematic quality.  Kapuściński discovered a world beyond Poland in the Cold War era.  Herodotus documented an epic tragedy that ended with the downfall of a great ancient empire.

In both narratives, readers discover new worlds through the eyes of Kapuściński and Herodotus.  For this reader, Travels with Herodotus benefited from the use of two screens.  The book itself was read on a tablet computer with Amazon.com’s Kindle software, while a laptop was used to search on the Internet for characters in Herodotus’ Histories and for the settings of Kapuściński’s travels. 

In a digital age, narrative text still can be a compelling storytelling choice.  However, today’s journalists can choose among—or combine—numerous other storytelling tools.  This essay examines five media tools that could enhance the story for a journalist retracing the two writers’ travels: film, personal narratives, interactive maps, social media, and blended multimedia.

A Robot’s World: After Outsourcing, Offshoring, and "The World is Flat"

In The World is Flat, Thomas L. Friedman (2007) argued that 10 political and technological forces—most notably, outsourcing and offshoring—have flattened our planet. 

Globalization supporters have contended that these trends have increased wealth throughout the world.  However, other economists have responded that globalization has not been without its costs, among them short-term disruption for workers whose jobs have been moved overseas and an increased use of energy from fossil fuels that has exacerbated the problem of climate change. 

Finally, moving beyond the trends that Friedman identified in The World is Flat, technological development might bring permanent displacement for many of the world’s workers. 

In this next wave of innovation, robots would manufacture many products, taking the jobs of human employees here in the United States and overseas in countries such as China.

Social Media, SEC Football, and the Missourian ICE Desk

This post was originally published at the Reynolds Journalism Institute blog.

With the Missouri Tigers joining the Southeastern Conference, we knew the 2012 football season was going to be big.

Probably the first question that many Tigers fans had was: Could Missouri compete against big-name SEC teams such as the Alabama Crimson Tide, the Georgia Bulldogs and the Florida Gators?