News

Pursuing story on energy prices helps resolve municipal problems

Business stories can develop in unexpected, almost mysterious ways, I was reminded recently when the business desk at my host organization took a closer at soaring electricity prices in Serbia. Exploring the factors behind the price hikes showed that some of the long standing problems may not be so impossible to solve as people thought.

Serbia’s state-run power company Elektroprivreda Srbije, or EPS, has been a huge monopoly for decades, a remnant of the Communist era that has dodged several privatization attempts.

Long journey from Metarica to Maputo

I am the first person in my family and among my friends to go to university. My parents are not schooled. They are peasants. They can’t speak Portuguese, they speak makuhwa. My father, though, was a cheke, a mwalima, learned in the Koran and respected in the village. We lived in Metarica, in Niassa province, in Mozambique s farthest north.

We are 11 siblings and I am the seventh, born in 1983. The eldest went to high school and became a border policeman. My other brothers work on the land. My sisters got married early. Two siblings died of disease.

Kick-off!

We're now a few days away from the start of the The Digital Tools for Public Service Journalism course. Monday, the 19th of May, marks its beginning.

A total of 42 applicants were selected to take part of these three weeks of online training.

They have a diversified profile. Altogether, 18 of the selected candidates are professionals from the country's media outlets, either newspapers, magazines or websites.

But we've also chosen a good number of citizen journalists and of reporters working for smaller news outlets: a total of 10.

“El futuro del periodismo queda en manos de los periodistas”

La Coordinadora de Proyectos del Consejo de Redacción en Colombia, Miriam Forero, habló con el becario Knight James Breiner a propósito del taller “Cómo fundar y manejar su propio medio digital”, que dictará a periodistas convocados por el CdR.

CdR: Hace poco en Colombia los dueños de la revista Cambio, reconocida por su enfoque investigativo, cerraron la publicación y un buen grupo de periodistas quedó sin empleo repentinamente. Así mismo, hemos visto fuertes recortes en las redacciones de otros medios.

Digital Tools For Public Service Journalism...Almost There

We did it...but actually, not yet. It was very tiring, we had some very long days of work, consumed a good deal of coffee and didn't have that much of sleep in the last few weeks, but I hope it will have been worth it.

We've nearly concluded the very last Unit of the AT&T sponsored course Digital Tools for Public Service Journalism. Right now, we are only going to correct whatever bits need to be changed and then we should be ready to roll.

We have, so far, received 75 applications of candidates with a somewhat diversified profile.

But, no, it is far from over.

India’s Tribal Citizens Use New Cell Phone Network to Produce Local News

Dozens of citizen journalists in India’s chronically neglected tribal communities are producing and sharing audio news reports for the first time through an innovative cell phone system launched by a Knight International Journalism Fellow.

Members of India’s 80-million-strong Adivasi tribal community now have easy access through their mobile phones to reports on important issues such as housing evictions, police abuse and rural education.

Big changes, but everything still the same

Editors Note: Zarina Geloo returns to the Times of Zambia sixteen years later.

Everything seems to have changed since I was last the Times of Zambia, it was a little unnerving, but I realised very quickly that actually, things are still the same.

Hot, humid and deathly

Editors Note: You don't have to go very far to find health stories in Maputo...just listen in the newsroom.

The health page was laid out late last week. I had a headache so I went home around 7 pm to lie down. Around 9:30 the editor called: our turn for layout. I hopped on a taxi and dashed to Savana, It was unbearably hot and humid. The newsroom is in the basement of an old house. The sub was sitting on the steps to the garden.

Mexican journalism student, 20, makes his mark

Jorge Tirzo helped teach a class of veteran journalists about how to make use of a blog.

Jorge Tirzo, a 20-year-old journalism student at the Monterrey Institute of Technology in Mexico, has managed to make a name for himself online.

In the photo above, he is showing a class of professional journalists the website that he and a group of fellow students launched, Revista Trecho.

Post-Copenhagen: Innovative Local Approaches to Climate Change

In January, a month after the world climate summit in Denmark, a diverse group of nearly 50 journalists, experts and entrepreneurs traveled to Berlin, Hamburg and Copenhagen to discuss climate change, energy and their global economic impact. Most of them were alumni of transatlantic exchange programs like those sponsored by the Bosch Foundation, the Rias Berlin Commission, the German Marshall Fund and Fulbright Commission. Four were Burns alumni.