By Yadana Htun | Thu., November 3, 9:59 AM
Yadana Htun receives her end of course certificate from Mathieu Robbins and Lisa Essex, Thomson Reuters Foundation course trainers.
On the first day of Thomson Reuters Foundation’s training course Writing and Reporting News in October, I met 13 journalists from Egypt, Paraguay, Italy, Brazil, Uganda, Hong Kong, China, Vietnam, Slovakia and Columbia.
I had never had this kind of experience of doing a journalism course together with journalists from various countries. Some of them were from print media, some broadcasters and some are working for online media. It’s a great opportunity to do the course together with such colourful classmates.
The first thing we had to do was introduce ourselves. Unlike a usual introduction, our trainers, Lisa Essex and Mathieu Robbins, asked us to split into pairs and then introduce our partners. It was the first opportunity for us to use a journalistic skill: asking questions. It forced us not only to get basic information, but also to get familiar with each other.
We visited the impressive newsrooms of Reuters that day and saw the nature of work in a big media organization. On our tour of the newsrooms, we learned how journalists work towards accuracy and timeliness. The foundation gave us another chance to explore a big newsroom on a trip to the Financial Times.
In the classroom, we did exercises on different topics. Sometimes, we were divided into groups for some exercises, which taught us the importance of teamwork. There were no boring moments and I enjoyed every part of the course.
The last day of this five-day-training was the greatest challenge for all of us, as we had a competition to make a multi-media package in the Reuters’ newly introduced website youtrust.org. At first, we thought the process of making a package on youtrust was quite hard. But when we eventually learned how it works, we realised that it could be a great tool for all of us to connect with the journalism world and to know what’s happening all over the world.
The course is over, but we are still learning from the classmates we met during the course and using what we learned in our everyday work. We share our articles and news, and discuss our stories.
I remember that on the first day of training most of my classmates didn’t know my country! Some hadn’t even heard the name Myanmar (Burma) before. After the training, they contacted me to make sure I’m ok as they were worried for me whenever they read news about Myanmar. Now, the world is not as big as I thought. Everyone is in our reach because of Thomson Reuters Foundation.
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