Whitney Foard Small, Regional Director of Communications for Asia Pacific and Africa of Ford Motor Co., and Tatt Chen, Senior Vice President of Penn Schoen Berland, Asia, were special guest speakers in Professor Lee Miller's Data Mining class on April 9.

Small and Chen, whose firm does consulting work for Ford, talked about how they measure the impact of public relations campaigns and the attitudes of key groups of potential customers.

"Measuring PR can be done," Small said.

Gharida Farooqi, a broadcast reporter from Pakistan, told KSTP-TV in Minneapolis that her country is more complex and dynamic than most Americans understand. Farooqi is participating in the U.S.-Pakistan Professional Partnership in Journalism, a program run by ICFJ designed to dispel myths and build partnerships.

In this 18-minute web chat, she addresses everything from hockey to gay rights.

In a region where few journalists know how to find and use data, two new Knight International Journalism Fellows will create a series of tech tools to help reporters in South America analyze material and investigate important stories such as the use of tax money in Argentina and the degradation of the Amazon. The new tools include interactive data blogs and online maps that display complex details in a way that readers and viewers can readily grasp.