Wednesday, October 31, 2007

Roskilde

I took the train from Århus down to Roskilde, which is about half an hour out of Copen- hagen, this morning. Here is the main train station in town, which has a very nice design. Good thing it was attractive, because I shouldn't have gotten off here. Turns out Roskilde University has its own train station, but my train did not stop there. So I also got to experiment with the local buses, to get out to the university. The joys of traveling without quite knowing where you are going.

The university is almost out in the countryside,
as you can see from the second photo, just down some steps from the communications school, where the view looks out over fields and trees.

I was having lunch with an old friend, Thomas Tufte, who teaches communi- cation there. Thomas also did his dissertation on Brazilian television, so we have known each other a long time. He maintains an interest in Brazil, so it was fun to talk about that. He works more these days on development communication, so we talked quite a bit about that, too.

One of the things we talked about is a new historical project I am starting on Brazilian television, interviewing one of the people who started TV Globo, the biggest network in Brazil, one of the biggest in the world in fact. The plan is to do an oral history of the first 15 years of the network from the point of view of an insider, who was originally from the U.S., part of a joint venture with Time-Life which started TV Globo. So he has a particularly interesting point of view on some crucial issues of just how much U.S. influence there really was in the start up of the network.

Interesting to have a long talk about Brazilian media in Denmark, but that's globalization for you.

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