LEARNING JOURNALISTIC SKILLS

THERE IS ALWAYS ANOTHER STORY

AIM, SARAJEVO, 22.11.1999.

Would you like to improve your journalistic skills? Would you like to do this by the help of outstanding, highly recognized journalistic masters? Sounds almost incredible, but in Sarajevo there are many possibilities for journalistic training, owing to one convenient and one inconvenient circumstance.

The first concerns the presence of a quite a number of international organizations in the BIH capital. They provide the ideas and financial support. The second is rather disturbing: during the war and in the aftermath period, journalism in Bosnia considerably deteriorated. Here is the origin of the cry for help in finances, in personnel, in expertise.

The American organization IREX PRO MEDIA intends to increase the quality of Bosnian journalism. Its training project started in September and will be completed by the New Year. ôWe do not work with beginnersö, says the IREX trainer Ivan Radovanovic. ôThe generation we are working with right now has a great potential, but insufficient experience. Many of them have become editors over the night, during the war, under the worst life conditions, and did not have a chance to acquire necessary editorial experience. We teach them the rules of the game, how to organize the work, how to design a newspaper, shortly - the secrets of the tradeö.

"Journalists, think with your own head, look with your own eyes!ö says Ljiljana Zurovac, a director of the School of Journalism organized by the Media Plan, in co-operation with the High School of Journalism from Lille (France). The main objective is to educate journalists to be independent.

A person wanting to enrol in this school must not be older than 27 and must have at least one year of working experience in the media or a B.A. degree. The schoolÆs slogan is: "A bit of theory, a lot of practical workö. The curriculum is conducted in very well equipped cabinets and concerns all types of journalism (agency, print, radio and TV, on-line reporting). A considerable attention is paid to journalistic ethics, culture of communication and culture of speech. In a ôconflict resolutionö workshop students are taught how to mediate between two or more conflicting parties, particularly in TV shows. A part of the school program is getting computer literacy, starting from switching on the machine to the surfing through the Internet. Most of the courses are though in the local language. The trainers include: Mirko Sagolj, Zlatko Dizdarevic, Zlatko Vukmirovic, Dzevdet Tuzlic and others. The visiting teachers-journalists from Lille teach in French. They include highly respectable French professionals.

The costs for training one student are 9.000 DM. The money is donated by the European Union, the French government, and the Westminster Foundation working in the Republic of Srpska. The courses are conducted three times a week for 8 hours, during 9 months. The other three days the students work in the media. After passing the final exam, they will get a diploma.

At the moment, the Media Plan School is attended by about 20 students from Bosnia and Herzegovina, including two from the Republic of Srpska. Director Zurovac talks about ambitious plans for the future: next year the program will be extended to the regional level, including ex-Yugoslavia, Albania, Bulgaria and Romania. New courses will be designed for professional journalists but for others having a close contact with journalism as well.

The Alternative Information Network (AIM) is also engaged in the training of young journalists. Its objective is to teach young people to write impartially, clearly and simply in the professional independent media. The AIM works intensively in particular cantons (Una-Sana, Middle-Bosnia, Hercegovina-Neretva and Bosnian-Drina) which during the war were completely excluded from the alternative communication flow and exposed to a heavy degree of the war propaganda. A number of local media have developed in these but in other cantons as well, needing new and skilful personnel. The AIM trainer Nada Salom says that student interested in working in the independent media are thought the key elements of the journalistic job: to compose a news, to write in an interesting, simple and clear way, without pomp and artificiality. The trainees, four of them in every cycle, get a symbolic financial assistance for staying in Sarajevo during the training. The training parallel takes place in the Republic of Srpska (with Branko Peric as a trainer).

"Journalists should not be oriented towards scandals at any cost. No story is worth a human life. There is always another storyö, says Dominic Medley, a trainer in the BBC Journalism School. "The central objective of our program is to help the journalists in BIH, especially young journalists. We teach them to report truthfully, to raise questions in the name of the public, and to avoid imposing their own opinions".

The BBC Journalism School in Sarajevo is a result of the co-operation between the Soros Media Center, the British Know-How-Fund and the BBC. The courses are thought directly by the BBC journalists which makes this school highly respected in the whole world. The students may choose between two separate courses: TV and radio journalism. Each course, conducted three times a year, lasts for 10 weeks and requires a full-day participation during 5 days a week. The cirruculum focuses on the production of the news programs, but includes other fields, like current affairs and advertising programs, work with a camera, film editing etc. The school owns the equipment necessary for an operating radio and TV station but is used only for educational purposes. The journalistic pieces made during the training are not aired.

After 10 weeks of serious work, the students have to take a complex (3-part) exam which guarantees them a BBC diploma. So far the School has been completed by more than 150 students (ranging from Sarajevo to Lusci Palanka). The education of the tenth generation of journalists is under way, consisting of 20 young journalists.

It is easy to understand the studentsÆ motivation for attending the BBC school. Dalibor Radic, from Bijeljina, a second-grade student at the Faculty of Political Science in Belgrade says that at his faculty ôthere is a lot of practice in print journalism, while electronic media are quite neglectedö. Amra Avdic, a fourth-grade journalism student from Sarajevo explains: "At our faculty there is no practical training in journalismö".

The right to attend the course is given to all journalists in Bosnia. The next BBC course will start in the second half of January in 2000. Students are expected to pay a symbolic entrance fee of 30 DM. Possibilities are provided; eagerness is thus crucial.

Nihad HASANOVIC

(AIM, Sarajevo)