INVITATION FROM NATIONAL PRESS FOUNDATION

Wednesday, December 24, 2008

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APPLY NOW FOR UPCOMMING PROGRAMS

WEBINAR: The Digital Transition for Journalists

When: January 22, 2009, 11:00 am

Speaker: Jonathan Collegio, National Association of Broadcasters Vice President for the Digital Transition

On February 17, 2009, full-power television stations nationwide will turn off forever the analog signals that first brought us I Love Lucy and The Andy Griffith Show. In their place, new digital signals will bring sharper-than-ever pictures and sound to millions of households that have purchased converter boxes or digital television sets and connected them properly. Government agencies and a large coalition of broadcasters and consumer groups are working to alert consumers about what they need to do, but it’s a monumental task. Learn about the issues surrounding the digital transition in a free, 75-minute webinar at 11 a.m. Thursday, Jan. 22. Limited space available on a first-come basis. To register, click here.

NPF NEWS & UPDATES
NPF Annual Awards Dinner will Honor Influential Journalists 0f 2008


On February 10, 2009, more than 1,000 people will gather at the Hilton Washington hotel to honor excellence in American journalism at the National Press Foundation’s 26th annual awards dinner. The awards dinner is NPF’s major fund-raising event for the year. Proceeds from the dinner support NPF’s fellowships and issue-oriented programs for journalists.

The seven awards presented at the dinner are among the most prestigious in journalism. This year, Charles Gibson of ABC News will receive the Sol Taishoff Award as Broadcaster of the Year for his insightful coverage of world and national affairs. Leonard Downie, Jr., vice president at large of the Washington Post Co. will receive the Benjamin C. Bradlee Award as Editor of the Year for a 17-year career as the paper’s top editor including 25 Pulitzer Prizes. Linda Johnson Rice, chairman and CEO of Johnson Publishing Co., which publishes Ebony and Jet magazines, and operates EbonyJet.com, will receive the W.M. Kiplinger Award for Distinguished Contributions to Journalism on behalf of herself and her family, which has nurtured and sustained a thriving publishing empire for more than half a century.

The Everett McKinley Dirksen Awards for Distinguished Coverage of Congress will be given to reporters at two news organizations that focused on Congressional earmarks in 2007 and 2008. Jonathan Allen of Congressional Quarterly and David Heath and Hal Bernton of the Seattle Times each did exemplary work in looking at links between Congressional votes and campaign contributions.

Nate Beeler, editorial cartoonist for the Washington Examiner, has been named the Berryman Cartoonist of the Year. PolitiFact will receive the Online Journalism Award. Austin H. Kiplinger of Kiplinger Washington Editors will receive the Chairman’s citation.

In a change from previous years, the dress code for this year’s awards dinner will be business attire. Tables, tickets, and program book advertisements can be purchased on our website. For further information about the dinner, contact Kerry Buker at Kerry@nationalpress.org.



NPF in Cyberspace - First Stop: YouTube

No longer is YouTube just a place for wannabe stars and comedians to share their (sometimes) entertaining videos with the world. At the National Press Foundation, we have begun using YouTube as way to provide video resources from our programs and events. We already have several clips from recent programs available on our YouTube channel, and we plan to add commentaries and interviews in the coming months. Please take a moment to come take a look at our channel, and subscribe to our video feed.

Paul Miller Fellows Learn New Tricks for Covering Congress

NPF’s Paul Miller Washington Reporting fellows added depth and context to their understanding of Congress and how to cover it during their monthly program day on December 8. Particularly helpful was the opener by Ron Nixon of the New York Times, who led a virtual tour of web sites that are useful for covering – and generating – stories out of regional delegations, congressional committees or agencies. Regional reporters Josh Drobnyk of The Morning Call and Mark Matthews of the Orlando Sentinel led a lively discussion of some common reporting issues and offered tips from their own experience. Also enlightening were a tour of the House Press Gallery, a spin through the new Capitol Visitors Center, and a session with press secretaries for two House members: Jonathan Beeton for Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) and Chris Jackson for Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-GA). The day ended in a fascinating back-and-forth with former Congressman Lee Hamilton, now Director of the Center on Congress at Indiana University.

NEW ON THE BLOGS

The NPF AIDS Helpdesk

Every Monday, veteran journalist Ruth Pollard shares HIV/AIDS online resources and discusses challenges in HIV/AIDS reporting. This week Ruth discusses: Andrew Pleasant’s recent article on the basics of good science reporting, substitution treatment as a way to prevent HIV transition in intravenous drug users, and the ways in which the Kaiser Family Foundation has engaged the entertainment industry in the issue of HIV/AIDS. To read more, visit the Helpdesk.

CALENDAR OF UPCOMING PROGRAMS AND EVENTS

January 12: Paul Miller Program

January 22: WEBINAR: The Digital Transition

February 10: 26th Annual Awards Dinner
ABOUT THE NATIONAL PRESS FOUNDATION

The National Press Foundation is a 501-c-3 that conducts free, all-expenses paid programs for journalists around the country and internationally. Since 1976, the National Press Foundation has provided professional development opportunities to more than 5,000 editors, producers and reporters, helping them to better understand and explain the impact of public policy on readers and viewers. Programs held in the nation's capital, around the country, and overseas, bring journalists together with leading authorities to discuss significant issues ranging from agriculture and economics to politics and zoology.

About Climate Change and more...

Internews helps Southern Journalists Hold Key Climate Negotiators to Account at UN Summit JamesFahn/Internews Climate Change fellows interview a German environment official (December 12, 2008) Reporters supported by Internews and its partners at the international climate negotiations underway in Poznan, Poland have made their mark in a series of scoops that have forced negotiators to take their responsibilities towards the developing world more seriously. Navin Khadka, a journalist with the BBC Nepali Service, highlighted a crucial two-year delay caused by bureaucratic fumbling in the approval of Nepal’s national plan to adapt to climate change. His work sparked an escalating blame game between two agencies and led to calls for a complete overhaul of the system. “There is an inherent complexity to access the fund, which needs to be reformed totally if the developing countries are to adapt to the challenges of climate change,” commented Saleemul Haq, head of the climate change group at the London-based International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED). Another example of the impact that developing world journalists made on the summit came at an event where the Norwegian Environment Minister, Erik Solheim, announced the creation of a fund to support sustainable energy technologies. In describing an example of what the fund could do, he cited the possibility of replacing the dirty and unsafe mobile generators supplying electricity for shops on the streets of Liberia and Sierra Leone. Little did the Minister know that there were journalists from Sierra Leone and Liberia in the audience. Harold Williams, a reporter for Africanews.com, subsequently asked whether there had been any studies of the impact such a project might have on Sierra Leoneans in the generator business. The Minister had to admit there had been no such studies, but seemed pleased nonetheless to have been posed the question, and before leaving made a point of going up and shaking Harold’s hand. Harold Williams and Navin Khadka are reporting from the UN Climate Summit thanks to the Climate Change Media Partnership (CCMP), an ambitious program launched at the Bali Summit in 2006 by Internews, Panos and IIED to scale up the quantity and quality of coverage of climate change issues and the international negotiations. The CCMP has brought 37 journalists from 29 developing countries to Poznan, Poland where the latest talks are being hosted. “We are more than just the largest media bloc here at the UN Summit in terms of number of journalists in Poznan and reach to hundreds of millions of people,” said James Fahn, the Director of Internews’ Earth Journalism Network. “According to the UN coordinators of the negotiations, who have been following our output, we are also providing some of the best informed, balanced reporting to key countries in the climate change fray, such as India.” For Internews and its partners in the CCMP, Poznan is a key steppingstone for the endgame negotiations to be held in Copenhagen at the end of 2009. “Every day here in Poznan our journalists have reported on how their own governments are either opening up or blocking the road to Copenhagen,” said Internews’ Mark Harvey. “2009 will be a definitive year for the world’s climate, and journalists supported by Internews, Panos and IIED will be there in force to ensure that audiences in the developing world get a ringside seat on what is being decided in their name.” The Climate Change Media Partnership’s work in Poland is funded by the UK Department for International Development (DFID), the V. Kann Rasmussen Foundation, the Germeshausen Foundation, the World Bank Institute for Sustainable Development, the Ashden Trust, the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Ford Foundation. About the Climate Change Media Partnership The Climate Change Media Partnership was created in 2007 to bring journalists to the UN climate change summit in Bali. The journalists produced around 720 stories during the summit and have gone on to cover climate change in depth over the past year. To interview any of the journalists who attended the Bali summit, please contact: mike.shanahan@iied.org For more information on the Climate Change Media Partnership see: www.climatemediapartnership.org After the success of last year's CCMP work in Bali, there was intense competition for this year's program. Of the 1092 journalists who requested information about the fellowships, 391 applied. The journalists selected to attend this year’s UN climate change summit in Poland are from Antigua; Bangladesh; Bhutan; Brazil; Cambodia; Cameroon; China; Colombia; Ethiopia; India; Indonesia; Jamaica; Kenya; Kyrgyzstan; Laos; Liberia; Madagascar; Malawi; Malaysia; Mexico; Mongolia; Myanmar; Nepal; Nigeria; Peru; Sierra Leone; Suriname; Uganda; Vietnam; and Zambia. The United Nations Development Programme’s 2007 Human Development Report on climate change states: “The media have a critical role to play in informing and changing public opinion. Apart from their role in scrutinising government actions and holding policymakers to account, the media are the main source of information for the general public on climate change science.” The heads of both the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, Yvo de Boer, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Rajendra Pachauri, have urged the media to do more to address climate change. See: * UN seeks media partnership on climate change * More Media Coverage of Climate Change a Necessity


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The Huffington Post - the Internet Newspaper: News blogs video community
The Permanent Campaign Has No Borders

December 18, 2008

By David Hoffman, Internews Network President

Why stop here? What started in America can spread across the globe. Having demonstrated the massive power of digitally connected social networks to transform the political landscape, the Obama campaign has reinvented the architecture of democracy. Entrenched power centers and special interests will retain substantial influence, but newly mobilized cyber citizens will increasingly define the national agenda. The four-year cycle of electoral politics will give way to the Permanent Campaign.

In the Permanent Campaign, partisan politics are not replaced by bipartisan compromise; they are transcended by post-partisan ad hoc coalitions built around issues. The Rovian politicization of government was a petri dish of inbred incompetence. David Axelrod's shock troops came together to bring about change, but they are more tactical than ideological. The Bush universe was static and inflexible; the Obamian is technocratic, open source and responsive. Politics in America will never be the same.

But neither will it be in the rest of the world. The unprecedented attention and passionate interest in the US election ensures that people everywhere will learn the lessons of Obama's victory. The 2008 election dramatically reverses the global narrative. Osama mania may begin to be replaced by Obama mania. The idea that the son of an African man could become president of the United States is certain to inspire the youth of the developing world. Whereas President Bush tried to impose democracy on the world from the top down and bring regime change by force of arms, Barack Obama's campaign can spread the virus of grassroots activism through the same kind of participatory media that fueled his campaign.

A smart, power-driven foreign policy has the potential to infect closed societies everywhere with the germ of freedom. To take the maximum advantage of this transformative moment, however, the new administration will have to do a radical makeover of the post-WWII, Cold War era United States public diplomacy apparatus. The foreign broadcasting budget swelled to $650 million dollars after 9/11. Arab language satellite television and radio stations were launched, but they failed miserably to gain an audience. Small wonder. People everywhere prefer getting their news from local sources. Al Jazeera's English language channel similarly failed to penetrate the American heartland.

In our hyper-connected digital world, governments cannot compete with YouTube in defining the narrative about international events. "Official" sources of information have little credibility. The government's role, rather, should be one of facilitating the growth of independent media and the unfettered use of the Internet and mobile phone technology. With a tenth of the budget spent on foreign broadcasting, US media NGOs have trained tens of thousands of journalists and helped start thousands of independent radio and television stations. Content management systems in Farsi have allowed new online and print publications to proliferate in Iran. Schoolchildren in Egypt are being taught how to use the new media tools. An SMS text news service is spreading across Sri Lanka. Independent radio stations are broadcasting programs about gender and tolerance from inside the tribal areas of Pakistan, and a network of radio stations has been established throughout Afghanistan -- all with relatively small amounts of US foreign assistance funds.

The principles of applying smart power to international relations are the same as the community organizing strategies that Barack Obama honed on the streets of Chicago. Instead of pre-packaged messages broadcast overseas, building the capacity of local media, independent bloggers, citizen journalists and investigative reporters, promotes transparency and creates a culture of democratic activism. Providing people with the tools to get the information they need and a voice that can be heard strengthens local communities and empowers public citizenship. The message can no longer be controlled. Information breeds freedom.

The Permanent Campaign is a dynamic model that poses a threat to authoritarian regimes everywhere. The hunger for change is not confined to America. If Barack Hussein Obama can succeed in overthrowing George W. Bush, then democracy is demonstrably real and people everywhere, no matter their race or identity, can start saying, "yes we can." President Obama can facilitate the spread of democracy without even mentioning the word. By championing the cause of information access as a universal human right, Obama will spread the Permanent Campaign to every corner of the earth. The technology for viral organizing is there. Two-thirds of the world has mobile phones and two billion people are online. This information space is vastly different than the tightly controlled airwaves of the Cold War era when our foreign broadcasting system was born. A new foreign assistance strategy that supports the growth of local independent media and universal access will restore American leadership in the cause of freedom. In the information age, the Permanent Campaign has no borders.


David Hoffman is President of Internews Network, a non-profit organization that has worked in over 70 countries to empower local media worldwide.

(Source:Internews)

SATISFACTORY PREPARATION AND EXPECTATION FROM THE COMING NATIONAL ELECTION :BANGLADESH

By the role of time Bangladesh a prospective developing country stands in a very crucial moment. The coming 9th parliamentary Election in other hand, the mandate of the peoples by this deciding the future of the country and next generation. View of out looking the preparation of election formation organized by the Election Commission, supported by the Military and Civil administration(specially personnel from PID) combined may be said satisfactory. But without the whole cooperation of total country's voters it cannot be implemented and free and fair election. Near 500 foreign observers, local journalists and domestic observers (from various media) are humbly waiting for to examine free-fair and non partiality. But if observers noticed in decepline or objections, the whole initiatives can be refused by the peoples of the country. After 36 years the country the nation expecting true results of opinions and secured future. So, no needed to express any else more. Our friendly countries, their Ambassadors and diplomats, United Nations, Commonwealth and neibourgh countries also hoping the same. Its known very well in the duration of care taking government many good things implemented well but possible to say in every way. Many pending issues and policy are collapsed willingly or postponed for the next elected government. Its true some issues such National Security Council, future International financial policy and responsibilities, Administrative principles, District and Metropolitan administration and ruling policy, Local governments, Education and Agricultural developments, Civil & Defense ruling combinations, Law justic, Upazilla formation & Local Government & Ruling Engineering (LGED), the power sharing and balance between the President and the Prime Minister etc formation possible only by the elected government, waiting for. It can be said suddenly, our expected anti corruption initiatives by the recently formatted National Anti Corruption Commission are being looked slowly the reason unknown. In the acknowledge many claimed and files are trashed totally by unknown cause. The main two political parties are performing their best approaches with much faith and commitments. Though the results depending each committed implementations by the proposed time and period. Now the further expectations depending on honesty, patriotism, true love for the peoples of the country, the election result can say only. In conclusion can be said waiting for accurate time and result of election and the coming elected government and opposition parties each other anticipations can make possible on the next National Assembly.

(Source:MUKTIDOOTH)