Roush teaches business journalism in Chile

Senior associate dean and Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Scholar in Business Journalism Chris Roush is teaching business journalism to students at the Universidad de los Andes in Santiago, Chile, for the next two weeks. The following is Roush's first dispatch from Santiago.

By Chris Roush

At the beginning of the journalism class I’m teaching at the Universidad de los Andes in Santiago, Chile, I asked the students who really wanted to be a journalist.

All but one of the 12 students raised their hand. That made me feel good about the future of journalism in South America.

Then, I asked the class how many of them had considered being a business journalist. Only two raised their hand.

That made me realize that it’s not just journalism students in the United States who need to be told of the possibilities of careers in business journalism. College students across the world are unaware that writing about business and the economy is one of the great jobs today in journalism.

Just look at the headlines: Facebook’s IPO garnered media attention across the globe. The economic upheaval in Spain and Greece makes headlines even here in Santiago.

These Chilean students do know that business is an important story. All of the students answered yes when I asked them if it would be front-page news if Chile’s most famous athlete – soccer player Alexis Sanchez – came back to the country and bought a tech company.

For the next two weeks, I will be teaching these students the basics of business journalism. Today, they wrote basic business news leads, and I graded them on the typical Chilean seven-point scale, with anything below a four being a failing grade. Tomorrow, we will tackle an earnings release. By the end of the two weeks, I hope they have the basics down, and I also hope that their English has improved.

In many ways, these students are just like the ones at Chapel Hill. One of them has already “friended” me on Facebook. Virtually all of them asked me questions about how to improve their stories while writing today. And yes, the class is overwhelmingly female, just like at UNC.

In other ways, they are a world apart. None of them live on campus because there are no dorms, and the university has no sports teams to root for. There is the big Bolivia vs. Chile soccer match coming up this weekend, however. And yes, you can see the snow-capped Andes from campus.

What all journalism students want is a job after graduation.

When I told these Chilean students that there were students graduating from UNC-Chapel Hill and going to work at Bloomberg News in New York making more than $70,000 as a reporter, I got their attention.