Moldovan journalists will be trained to cover issues of public interest

A project to monitor the press in Moldova and train the journalists how to cover issues of public interest was launched Friday by the Independent Journalism Center in partnership with the Tiraspol Media Center and the Sofia Media Development Center, Info-Prim Neo reports. The €150,000 project is financed by the Delegation of the European Union to Moldova. According to the Delegation's Head Dirk Schuebel, this is one of the five projects of the European Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights for 2009, whose total value is €600,000. “I'm glad that this project is launched within the Press Freedom Week held in Moldova. The major objective of the European Instrument is to strengthen democracy and the state of law. We want to help the civil society and the mass media to become a credible force,” Dirk Schuebel said. The two-year project has several components, among which monitoring of the media content of 15 media outlet, including from the Transnistrian region, and evaluation of the problems prevailing in covering topics of public interest. The monitoring reports will serve as basis for developing a targeted training strategy for journalists. A series of training seminars will be organized in which Bulgarian as well as Moldovan experts will train journalists in covering public interest topics. Later, the trainees will produce common stories for the print and broadcast media, thus applying the knowledge learned during training. Nadine Gogu, executive director of the Independent Journalism Center, said one of the objectives of the project is to strengthen the professional cooperation relations between journalists from different regions of the country. Debates will be held in a number of towns and district centers of Moldova, including Transnistria. Luiza Doroshenko, executive director of the Tiraspol Media Center, said the monitoring of the print and broadcast media in the Transnistrian region is something of a novelty. “I hope the Transnistrian journalists will take part in this project as the quality of journalism in the region must be improved,” she said, adding that a part of the journalists might ignore the project owing to the arrest of journalist Ernest Vardanyan in Tiraspol. Dirk Schuebel said similar projects and confidence building measures are needed in order to change the situation in the region. The training seminars will be also attended by journalists from the Autonomous Territorial Unit of Gagauzia. An analytical journal titled “The Mass Media in Moldova” will be issued within the project in three languages.