2007 PRESIDENT'S REPORT

Charlie Hood — Prague Exchange

When Dean Emeritus Charlie Hood lived in and around Prague, Czech Republic, after retiring from UM’s School of Journalism, he couldn’t help but notice the similarities between that country’s Roma people and the Native Americans back in Montana.

Last year, with five of UM’s brightest journalism students in tow, Hood traveled back to Prague to re-examine the situation.

Hood paired with Prague’s Charles University to form reporting teams of one Czech student and one UM student to find and tell the stories of the Roma, an indigenous group that has been marginalized in modern Czech society. After three weeks in Europe, the Czech students came to Montana to report on Native Americans and the Montana State Prison with their UM counterparts.

“I heard a quote when I lived over there from a Romany woman,” Hood says. “She said, ‘A lot of the time when reporters come to see the Roma, they already have their minds made up about what they’re going to find.’ That stuck in my mind.”

For the students, the experience was a taste of reporting on the largest scale.

Senior Zachary Franz, who is now a reporter at the Great Falls Tribune, took a bus across the country, found a translator and interviewed two Roma women who are suing the government because they claim they were sterilized without consent.

“I felt like a real foreign correspondent,” he says. “Until I tried to order my next meal and had to point to something on the menu and hope it wasn’t an internal organ.”

The project culminated in a Web site and can be found at
http://www.umjschool.typepad.com/prague07/.

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