CONTENTS
HIGHLIGHTS
November, 1995 |
Another way to involve journalists is to provide training or other professional seminars and workshops. Such events can be conducted as part of the organization's communication activities. One approach is to offer training that improves journalists' understanding of family planning and reproductive health. Such sessions can vary in length from a single day to two weeks and can vary in audience from top-level editors to news reporters. In Kenya, for example, the African Council on Communication Education, with assistance from Family Health International (FHI), conducted a 2-week training workshop for 24 journalists from East and Southern Africa in 1990. The workshop followed the training curriculum for journalists developed by FHI, later published as Developing Health Journalists: A Training Manual for Improving News Coverage of Reproductive Health (7). Another approach is to bring journalists together with family planning program staff to learn from each other and to explore how the two sides can cooperate to improve cover- age of family planning and reproductive health. Ideally, planning for such workshops should involve journalists themselves to insure that the workshop not only reflects program interests but also meets journalists' needs. In Bangladesh, for example, the Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs, the Press Institute of Bangladesh, and FHI collaborated in 1994 on concurrent workshops for journalists and for family planning news media relations staff. The journalists' workshop followed the standard FHI curriculum, while the curriculum for the news media relations workshop was based on the findings of two needs assessments, one among journalists and the other among family planning and other health-care organizations (34, 66). Then, in several joint sessions the participants from the two workshops reviewed common rumors about family planning, practiced holding interviews, and discussed how to work together better in the future. Since then the journalists and news media relations specialists have continued to meet regularly (31). Such workshops usually yield immediate stories. Even more important, they yield long-term benefits by establishing better communication between journalists and family planning programs. |