Olga Guterres found a solution to the barking dogs and crowing roosters that kept spoiling her narration of a television story—a sound-proof booth.

In her case, it was a relatively low-tech booth: one of the International Center for Journalists' sports-utility vehicles. Climbing into the car’s relative quiet, Guterres and Alexandrina de Sa recorded the narration without distracting animal noises.

The sound lesson was among the first taught by ICFJ’s first news media production office in East Timor, which opened in Baucau in the fall of 2008. The office enables journalists to conduct research, access high speed internet—a rare commodity on this war-shattered island—and take part in journalism training workshops.

ICFJ will open three more media offices around the country in early 2009. The development of these media offices is just one part of ICFJ’s five-year mission in East Timor which started in September 2006 and is funded by USAID and Australia’s AusAID: ICFJ also assists the National University in Dili in setting up a four-year Social Communications program, provides a wide variety of journalism training, assists media in developing their advertising departments, provides small grants to community radio stations and helped set up a commission to draft the country’s media law. ICFJ’s objective is to support the development of a strong, professional and sustainable independent media sector in East Timor.

Olga, Sandra and Josefina were taking part in an intensive two-week ICFJ training program in Baucau – East Timor’s second largest city. All three women had some journalism experience, having worked as volunteers at their local community radio stations, but they lacked TV training.

Though each of the participants had plenty of story ideas, many of the people they would need to interview were away to celebrate the upcoming Christmas holidays. The trainees became a bit discouraged and frustrated, but refused to give up.

Olga and volunteers at Radio Matebian-Baucau, proposed doing a story on one of the local senior high schools. She discovered that the school, called Kilik Waiga’e, had opened three years earlier through the initiative of students and people in the community. Her teammates, Sandra and Josefina, liked the idea, too, and with help from their instructor, Lusse Cloutier, prepared a list of questions, identified people to interview and discussed how to shoot the story.

None of the three participants had used a TV camera before and most had almost no computer skills, but they were determined to learn as much as they could in almost two weeks of training. Some of their training days began at 8 a.m. and ended after 9 p.m. But in their enthusiasm, all three trainees insisted on staying on a bit longer than planned in order to better understand what they had learned during the day. “I’ve never had a chance to touch a camera and to do video editing on a computer. This training helped me to enhance my knowledge of media in general,” Olga said.

The training covered all aspects of producing a TV package -- from the story idea and list of interview subjects, through shooting, editing and writing the script, down to recording the narrator’s voice track. On the twelfth and last day of training, a few final shots needed to be re-shot for the two minute TV package and in the afternoon, Olga recorded additional narration. This time she was able to use the Baucau Media House for recording, because on this particular day, the noisy neighbors—the roosters and dogs—were sleeping.

Read more information on ICFJ's work in East Timor.

by Charles S. Rice