Kids pose with “Uncle Ho” in the heart of Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon.

If what you know about Vietnam is from an old war movie, it’s time to turn the page and take a fresh look. Yes, it’s a Communist country. But it’s also a society that is modernizing its media and eager to have a voice in the global conversation.

Lecture and discussion of news anchoring and program hosting at VTV training center, Hanoi.

I went to Vietnam in June 2014 to teach two courses: news anchoring and program hosting, and short news package reporting. In Hanoi, I met rotating groups of young journalists in the training center for VTV, the state broadcaster. The up and coming anchors, hosts and reporters were an impressive bunch. Many have degrees from universities in the US, the UK or Australia, although not always in journalism. Some of them needed to learn the basic skills of multimedia storytelling. Others were more experienced documentarians and program hosts.

Experimenting with a more “casual, comfortable and connected” presentation style on VTV 1.

Some of our best work wasn’t done in the classroom.  We did mock newscasts and talk shows. It was hard to convince some presenters that it was their job to command the viewer’s attention with a confident delivery; they showed me clips of a longtime star anchorwoman who meekly averted her gaze as she barely whispered the news.  Some of my students feared a more forceful presentation would be seen in their culture as too aggressive.

A workshop exercise called “passing the pen” to encourage anchor teamwork.

In the reporting class, we hit the streets to gather video for news packages that could be shot and edited in one day.

Shooting an interview in the lotus fields near Hanoi.

The pace of work is different here. People rotate through the anchor chair each day because it’s considered too stressful for one person to anchor five days a week, or even two days in a row. One of my reporting groups did a story on the national tradition of taking a nap in the office in the middle of the day.

A midday nap is a tradition in Vietnamese offices, even VTV.

The idea of a “one-person-band” or MMJ didn’t make much sense here. Except for breaking news, reporter-photographer teams generally have a couple of days to complete a story. However, it must be noted that all of my trainees held down their full time regular jobs while participating in the training, which resulted in long days for all of them.

VTV journalists with degrees from the US, UK and Australia worked long days as workshop translators.

Consumer reporting is the hot ticket these days. Vietnam has followed a policy of “doi moi,” which embraces profit-making businesses. With so much free enterprise going on, there are also plenty of consumer scams to be investigated. Hidden cameras –and even Google Glass — are frequently used to catch bad guys in the act. My students did not see any reason to identify the hidden camera footage in their stories because “we use it all the time.”

The Ho Chi Minh mausoleum at night.

There is no debate or investigation of government policy, which is presented exactly as the government wants it to be. But young journalists, eager to practice their trade, proposed and delivered stories questioning food safety, housing plans and price fixing. One team profiled  a humble food vendor, peddling a bike through city streets and selling fruit to support her struggling farm family in the countryside.

Interviewing a Hanoi fruit vendor who struggles to support her family.

The big breaking news story is the dispute with China over the East Sea. China has set up oil drilling in an area the Vietnamese consider to be Vietnam’s territorial waters. The resulting cat and mouse game between the two nations’ fishing and military vessels is the lead story on the news almost every night. Vietnam needs friends around the world, and especially in the ASEAN nations, to press its claim to the area. So it’s not surprising that Vietnam has seen the success of channels like China’s CCTV, Russia Today, and Al Jazeera English as an incentive to create a 24-hour international channel that will bring Vietnam’s own message to viewers around the world. They want the world to know they are an emerging Asian economic engine that is definitely open for business.

Standup explaining how runoff from a new highway has flooded people’s homes.

Hanoi was a fascinating place to visit in my free time. Mindful of the respect due to all who fought in the Vietnam war, I visited Hao Lo prison, where the museum display portrays the captivity of American POWs as something more like a summer camp for unruly boy scouts.

Sen. John McCain’s flight suit is on display at the “Hanoi Hilton,” but most exhibits refer to Vietnamese Communists imprisoned by the French.

I also visited the bomb shelter under the pool at the Metropole Hotel, where actress Jane Fonda and singer Joan Baez took shelter during US bombing raids over Hanoi. While zipping around town on the back of my students’ motorcycles, we stopped at a pond where the wreckage of a B-52 could still be seen.

Best way to see Hanoi? Friends with motorbikes!

To the young journalists who became my friends, the war is something from the history books. They were eager to share their culture — from food to water puppetry — with an American teacher. They even made sure I visited a designer shop for Vietnam’s national dress, the ao dai, so I could have one custom-made to fit.

Inside the Temple of Literature, students leave offerings for success on competitive national exams.

I made an appointment to see the Ho Chi Minh sites with “Hanoi kids,” a group of college students who give free tours in exchange for a chance to practice their English with a native speaker. A striving business student walked me through Vietnam’s oldest university, the Temple of Literature, where today’s students make offerings  for success on make-or-break national examinations.  Education is highly prized in Vietnam and teachers are treated with respect.

Each four day workshop ended with a party, thrown by the students.

Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City, had a completely different vibe, and at times seemed stuck in the 1970s. Judging from the classic rock played in taxicabs, the soundtrack of the place was from the era of what the Vietnamese call “the war of American aggression.” I stopped for a beer in the rooftop bar of the Caravelle Hotel and tried to soak up the history of the war correspondents who attended the daily war briefings known as “The Five O’Clock Follies” and then bravely told the truth: that the US-led war strategy was not going to lead to victory.

Nick Ut’s iconic photo “Napalm Girl” has a place of honor in the War Remnants Museum.

An exhibit in the War Remnants Museum of the last photos taken by photographers who were killed on both sides, showed the crucial role of journalists on the front lines. The Reunification Palace museum of the US-backed South Vietnamese regime was frozen in time, with its basement bunker, rotary phones and teletypes. A visit to the Cu Chi tunnels showed the many different ways in which the Viet Cong conducted guerrilla warfare, with eerie gunfire crackling from a tourist firing range. It was definitely a case of the winning side writing the history.

Inside the Cu Chi tunnels, now a museum of Viet Cong war tactics.

VTV has embarked on an ambitious training program for its current group of broadcast journalists. I’m just one of many teachers who will be presenting the international best practices of everything from social media to conflict-zone reporting. Here’s hoping it’s a small but significant step toward greater freedom of information.

A promising team of anchors and reporters at the anchor desk of VTV 9 in Ho Chi Minh City.