Event date: 14 & 15 July 2011
Region: EU
The Media Diversity Institute held a workshop on media relations for 15 Non-Governmental Organisations (NGO) from New EU States, on July 14th and 15th, 2011, in London. The training was intended to help the NGO’s learn how to use the media to assist them in their work of combating discrimination.
The NGO representatives came from the new member states of the European Union – Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Romania and Bulgaria.
Experienced trainers and BBC journalists, Tim Grout-Smith and Lily Poberezhska, led the workshop, providing mainly hands-on practical training. Topics covered included: what journalists want, selecting media friendly aspects of NGO work, clarity of language and message creation and presentation. The training was interactive with many group exercises, culminating in individual on-camera interview practise.
One participant, Gediminas Andriukaitis of the Lithuanian Centre for Human Rights commented that there were no such trainings available in his country, although they were sorely needed. Iwona Nowak of Poland’s Halian Niec Legal Aid Centre said she would translate all the handouts into Polish and give them to her 9 colleagues at a special meeting to ensure that all the very useful and practical points she had learned were transmitted. All the participants took an active part in the training and expressed their satisfaction at the appropriate and helpful lessons they had learned which they could use in their daily work.
The workshop is part of an 18-month project – The Ethical Journalism Initiative – conducted by the International Federation of Journalists in cooperation with the Media Diversity Institute and Article 19 to improve media coverage of ethnicity, race and religion.
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