As a Knight International Journalism Fellow, Sunday Dare has helped the Daily Trust, the most widely read newspaper in northern Nigeria, launch an eight-page weekly health section. He is working with a team of dedicated health reporters there to improve coverage of health news, and his trainees are producing investigative pieces that have led to better policies.

Four days after the Daily Trust broke news of an outbreak of the deadly lassa fever, the government announced it had distributed treatment vaccines as well as safety gloves and vests.

The International Center for Journalists aims to build stronger and better-informed communities of Latin American immigrants by creating a corps of community radio reporters and citizen journalists who will develop and share higher-quality multimedia programming across stations and borders.

About the Conference

The International Center for Journalists selected 13 participants to participate in a Seminar on Future Energy: Sustainable Energy for a Low-carbon World in Samsø Island, Denmark on December 11-13, 2009.

Joachim Buwembo helped to create Kilimo Kwanza (Agriculture First), now a financially vibrant weekly publication focusing on agriculture issues. The eight-page supplement is published in English and Kiswahili by the Guardian Newspapers, the country’s top independent newspaper group.

Since it began, the supplement has featured more than 200 stories. Some reports led to new bank loans for farmers to buy imported tractors that lay idle as well as to increased government investment in dairy equipment and irrigation.

Mia Malan launched the first weekly health program at Soweto TV, the largest community TV station in Africa, with more than 1 million viewers. She trained a team to produce high-quality feature reports for the show with a special focus on HIV/AIDS. The half-hour show features topics such as the use and abuse of antiretroviral drugs, male circumcision, attention-deficit disorder and organ transplants.

In addition to the new half-hour weekly show, health stories on Soweto TV’s daily news reports have increased threefold as a result of Malan’s efforts.

Participants Santos Jiménez from Perú, Ángela Ávalos from Costa Rica, and Tamoa Calzadilla from Venezuela, work together during the multimedia reporting session at the Health Journalism Seminar in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.

Journalists learned techniques for analyzing scientific journal articles, making stories of new scientific disclosures and researching medical issues using the Internet. Participants also learn about producing stories for multimedia platforms.

How well prepared are journalists from the U.S. Hispanic media and the media organizations of Latin America, which typically have far fewer resources, to provide ample coverage? How much less prepared are the people whom these journalists serve when they confront disaster? How well prepared are the journalists themselves, who are after all among the ranks of “first responders” at the scene of any disaster?

To provide answers to these questions, ICFJ developed an 8-day training program for 14 U.S.

Sponsored by the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund, this program was designed to boost the capacity and motivation of journalists in the Caucasus region to report on conservation of biological diversity. The program was tailored to address the key issues facing each country, such as better management of protected areas, increasing the number and size of protected areas, controls on damaging activities, and other conservation issues of public interest.