On Thursday and Friday, February 18 and 19, I accompanied five students on a reporting trip to the DeSoto Times Tribune in Hernando, Miss. This was the school’s third field trip to a newspaper this semester. In January we had traveled to Vicksburg, where our students produced multiple platform pieces for the Vicksburg Post. Two weeks later we took another group of students to the Madison County Times.
After our assignment dinner with the editor and publisher of the Hernando newspaper on Thursday night, I had returned to Oxford for a board meeting of the Kosovo Institute for Journalsm ((Misspelled journalism)) and Communication. Six students: Jason Darby, Jackie Garrett, Alex McDaniel, Emily Roland, Brittany Stack and Jasmine Wright formed a reporting team that wrote 12 stories for the newspaper. Alex, the editor of the Daily Mississippian, coordinated the reporting and writing. This is the task of a professor. However, because of Alex’s experience, we asked her to do it.
Students finished their stories before 9 am. I drove to the Southaven Hampton Inn to edit them. However, the computer at the business center did not work, and I could not get e-mail to my laptop. So I would have to wait until I could access a computer.
Because of the weather delays one often encounters while traveling through Chicago’s O’Hare, I decided to take the first flight out of Memphis. I left the hotel at 4:30 for a 6 a.m. flight. I arrived at the Red Carpet Club room before 8:30. The flight to Dubai, via Washington Dulles, did not leave until after 6 pm.
After more than 10 hours at O’Hare, I boarded United 976. The flight arrived on time on Sunday night at Dubai International Airport, but it was after midnight before we arrived at the Radisson Hotel in Sharjah.
