Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas

Short Courses of the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas

Knight Center Trains 160 Latin American Journalists Online to Improve Election CoverageKnight Center Trains 160 Latin American Journalists Online to Improve Election Coverage
By PAUL ALONSO

The Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas is offering two free online courses in Spanish simultaneously that deal with electoral coverage. The 160 participating journalists come from 17 countries.

“Electoral Coverage and Democracy” is taught by María Teresa Ronderos, a well-known Colombian journalist and instructor. “Mathematics for Journalists Applied to Electoral Coverage” is offered by Sandra Crucianelli, an Argentine journalist who offers courses throughout the hemisphere.

The 160 participants are from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru, Paraguay, Uruguay and Venezuela.

The goal is to improve the level of training for journalists in the Americas who will cover elections in 2009 and in the future. For the "Electoral Coverage and Democracy” course, more than 300 journalists applied for a limited number of spaces. The Center is offering "Mathematics for Journalists" to 100 reporters and editors.

“I believe this course in electoral coverage will give participants a variety of instruments to make their work during the campaigns more original, more investigative, more bold, and really more useful for the citizen,” Ronderos says.

“In recent years, we’ve seen the manipulation of information, especially related to electoral polls,” Crucianelli says. "At this level, mathematics and applied statistics make an important contribution because they prevent the reporter from becoming a mere diffuser of outside findings of outside findings … to take a more active role, associated with the classical watchdog function that characterizes journalism."

"The intent of these virtual courses is to make all the tools of technology available for training, to form journalists who are better trained and thus more independent from oral sources when they need to carry information to their audiences,” Crucianelli adds. Several students agree that the courses help them to cover elections for citizens. rather than simply follow the agenda of politicians.

“The course has given me the tools to plan coverage of electoral processes, but from the point of view of what readers and citizens need, and to avoid the manipulation by public relations officers, or press spokesmen for the parties and candidates,” says Mexican journalist Beatriz Fregoso, of Grupo Imagen.

For Pilar Teijeiro Bove of TV Ciudad in Montevideo, Uruguay, “the course helps me to rethink my work as a journalist and to focus on citizens as the recipients of information. It gives me new elements and, above all, allows me to think of new angles for making this coverage one of the most sensitive themes of a democracy.”

Mexican reporter Manuel Mora of Periódico A.M. in León, Guanajuato adds, “Until recently, I wasn’t very clear how a report about public transportation could be included in the agenda of electoral coverage. The course teaches us why.”

The two courses are part of the Knight Center’s distance education project, which also offeres classes in Portuguese and English.

The Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas was created at the University of Texas at Austin School of Journalism in August 2002 thanks to a generous donation from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Its main objective is to help journalists in Latin America and the Caribbean to develop their own self-sustaining training programs to elevate the professional and ethical levels of journalism in the Americas.

In 2007, the Center received an additional five years of funding from the Knight Center to reorient its work as a digital media training center for Latin American and Caribbean journalism.
by PAUL ALONSO

Added May 21, 14:17, 2009