This website takes an innovative approach to digital storytelling, chronicling the personal and professional experiences of 33 Emerson College students and two faculty members living and working for two months in China. The students work for the Olympic News Service, the agency that reports on the Olympic Games on behalf of the news media. The students are in Beijing for July and August as guests of the Beijing Olympic Committee and the Communication University of China. They will be volunteering at sports venues for the Games.
This site is about Beijing, its people and the interaction Emerson students have with the culture, the life and the personalities of this large, complex and intriguing capital city. It will not showcase the Olympic Games themselves. But it will showcase the life of a city transformed by the Games and encountered by Emerson students.
The website features geotagging, a way to provide geographical identification to pictures and postings. As the world truly becomes a global village, putting actual longitude and latitude information into stories will become more common in both professional reporting and citizen journalism. With these interactive tools, the site aims to provide a picture and location of each student’s Beijing experience as well as a montage of all of them. Enjoy!