IJC agenda for October

In October, the Independent Journalism Center (IJC) has a diverse agenda, with plenty of interesting and useful activities for journalists, and not only.

The Training and Communication Department continues the media literacy lessons for the students from different high-schools within the country, during which the young people have the opportunity to meet and discuss with journalists from Radio Free Europe about press, information and manipulation. A novelty is the launch of an evaluation study of the media NGO sector in Transnistrian region, about the necessities and problems of the media NGOs in the region, as well as about the development opportunities available for journalists.

The Media Law and Policy Department will organize a round table where the problem of the press access in the parliament meeting room will be discussed again. Later, a press club involving journalists and civil society representatives will take place, where this issue will be addressed. Traditionally, the legal service will continue to monitor the media situation in Republic of Moldova, as well as the law modification initiatives in this area. It will also provide free legal assistance to the media institutions and journalists
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The team of the Media-Azi and Research Department will prepare news and other articles about the freedom of speech, access to information, the objectivity of the subjects covered by media, the compliance of the journalistic norms and the current legislation. In the reference period, a commentary section will be launched, where several national experts will refer to the European media standards. In this new section, subjects such as: transparency of the media ownership, plagiarism and norms of fighting this phenomenon in the European countries, media pluralism, access to information,  terrestrial analogue to digital terrestrial TV transition etc will be tackled. Also in October, the interviews section will bring to the fore other media personalities who will talk about the actual problems faced by the press in R. Moldova.

At the School of Advanced Studies in Journalism, in October several courses will take place: Long Articles, Media Law, Ethics and Media Diversity. Within the Ethics course, the students will be familiarized with notions and ethical principles, journalistic codes of conduct and the standards of good practice, so that at the end of the course, the students have the necessary knowledge and skills in order to take editorial decisions, based on what they have studied. Later on, for three weeks, the students will learn from the radio journalists and directors all the processed and components  of a radio channel: from the work meeting to the appearance on the “sound waves”, namely: the selection, writing, editing of the radio news bulletin subjects. The Radio journalism course will be held by the journalists Liliana Barbăroșie, Liliana Nicolae and Vasile Botnaru.

Also, in October the Discussion Club meeting will start at the School of Advanced Studies in Journalism. Reprezentatives of the international organizations, politicians, NGO workers, press managers, experts of various fields will have informal discussions with the students on actual, public interest topics. The first guest of the Discussion Club is the new Head of the OSCE Mission to Moldova, Ambassador Michael Scanlan. 

IJC activities are funded by European Union; the Embassy of the United States of America to Moldova; Civil Rights Defenders (Sweden); Media Legal Defence Initiative, USA Agency for International Development (USAID), Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) Mission to Moldova etc.