CCSU in Paris

CCSU Journalism students in May 2023 at the Olympic Village for the 2024 games in Paris.

CCSU in Paris

In May 2023, 12 journalism students and two professors visited Paris as part of a course focused on 2024 Olympics, which will be hosted in the city, followed by the Paralympics. Prior to travel, students studied the challenges cities face when they take on the Olympics and used that knowledge to inform visits to the Olympic Village, currently under construction, and interviews with business people around the Seine, among other sites. More than 10,000 media professionals from around the world will have credentials and stay in the media village. During our visit to Le Parisien- Aujourd’hui, Benoit Lallement, the editor overseeing coverage, said his paper will have 30 people covering the Olympics, including a reporter assigned to cover breakdancing, which is making its Olympic debut. Paris officials hope hosting the Olympics will expedite the redevelopment of the impoverished Saint-Denis area where the village will be located. A thriving community in 2025 will be the big win, we often heard. On a different historical note, the class visited Bobigny to see its emergency as an official Holocaust memorial site. In 2014, CCSU Journalism students visited the former deportation station, which was used to transport Jews to death camps in 1943-44. At the time, it was hidden from the street and without signage. The memorial opening this year tells a fuller story of the Nazi terror. This stop on our travels is in recognition that most of the students in our course made the trip to Paris with funds from the Sigrid Schultz Scholarship, which was created by the estate of the American foreign correspondent who alerted the world to the dangers of Adolf Hitler.

Faculty co-directors: Dr. Vivian Martin & Prof. Darren Sweeney