By Nino Patsuria | Wed., September 7, 5:08 PM
Now and again we all suffer moments of terrible luck that come at the worst possible times. And mine was the attack of some unnamed disease- of which I’ll spare you the details- that appeared just a few days before my departure for the long awaited Thomson Reuters Writing Financial and Business News course. It affected me so badly that I was on the brink of cancelling my flight and throwing my tickets in the bin.
But my expectations of the training course were so high that in the end my family literally bundled me onto the plane for a long and exhausting 6-hour trip that I thought I would never survive. But I made it. And it turned out to be worth the sacrifice, irrespective of the horrible London weather that greeted me.
I don’t know if there are courses elsewhere in the world that provide more professional training and a friendlier environment than Thomson Reuters Foundation does, but this one is the best I’ve ever experienced. Journalists in developing countries like me can scarcely imagine anything better to improve their skills and get a real grip of the developed world’s free media climate. This may only be the second day of my training course but it would be no exaggeration to say that I have probably improved my professional skills and understanding of good reporting ten times more than in my seven years of financial reporting in Georgia. Figures that had previously seemed mysterious have become friendly and helpful.
The frustration of any ailing person was shortly overcome by my first impressions of the seminar and meeting both trainers who provide invaluable advice and journalists from all over the world with similar thought processes and worries to mine. This refreshed my waning feeling that even just a few independently-thinking journalists who truly care about strong facts, take an impartial approach and uphold professional standards, may lay the ground for positive change, which although may be invisible at first, will grow and flourish gradually.
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