2010 hasn’t been kind to Haiti. Not that the past few decades – or even two centuries – have been generous, but an earthquake, hurricane and the introduction of cholera have made these past eleven months particularly challenging. It’s also why there has been so much hype about Sunday’s much-anticipated presidential and parliamentary elections.

As a part of the ICFJ's program in Panama, we are training correspondents who frequently work under risk covering not only community issues but also crime in cities affected by drug trafficking. Ethics, professionalism and methods of verification and bullet-proofing stories are crucial elements in the workshops.

Panama -- For a brief moment, I felt like being in a Mexico province, not in Colon, at the Caribbean port of entry of the Panama Canal.

PANAMA -- Journalists working from the Panama provinces are not quite fortunate in regard to training: they live and work to far away from the country's capital and don’t have the same opportunities to take seminars and workshops usually available for their colleagues in Panama City.

Reporters and editors working in the provinces are usually non-staffers, working as free-lancer correspondents for the main newspaper, national TV and radio companies; Unless they are willing to travel to Panama on their own to attend the workshops, they rarely receive training.

In some instances the m

Six officers from New York City were standing around the tent camp in Haiti. Several questions later, the reporter I was working with had his first scoop.I generally reserve Tuesday mornings to work with Louis-Jean Olivier, a young journalist with the Haiti Press Network. Although Olivier had been studying journalism at the State University, he didn’t start working as a reporter until after the January earthquake, when on a fluke he ended up filing a story for HPN. He so impressed HPN’s owner that he was hired on the spot and has been working for the agency ever since.

El sitio www.mipanamatransparente.com fue relanzado este miércoles 13 de octubre en la ciudad de Panamá. La denuncias ciudadanas comenzaron a llegar de inmediato.