Check out this awesome presentation about The Maldives Project and the country in general.
Just came across this article from Minivan News that pretty much summarizes the current state of the media in the Maldives. What particularly hit home for us here in the Maldives Project was this quote from Tiare Rath, an American journalist who spoke to Maldivian journos last Thursday:
“…one of the major issues all my students talked about is resistance among newsroom leadership – editors and publishers. Even if the journalists support and understand the principles being taught, they consistently tell me they cannot apply them,” Rath said. “This is a very, very serious problem that needs to be addressed.”
“…one of the major issues all my students talked about is resistance among newsroom leadership – editors and publishers. Even if the journalists support and understand the principles being taught, they consistently tell me they cannot apply them,” Rath said. “This is a very, very serious problem that needs to be addressed.”
We’ve come to the conclusion that the Maldives is, in fact, four countries in one. Here are the four types of islands that you’ll find in the Maldives. They all have their pros and cons.
It’s an island of about 2000 people – a 30-minute seaplane ride north of Male’, the Maldivian capital – and it takes about five minutes to walk from one end to another.
In the Baa Atoll Education Center, we were greeted by a group of 15 young students who were incredibly eager to get hands-on multimedia training.
In an intensive week-long workshop, [...]
During a workshop in Eydhafushi, we were paid a short visit by a journalist from the Eydhafushi Times – the island’s leading local news!
(Full disclosure: the reporter was also the IT guy at the school where we were teaching.)
Check out the piece here!
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As you can read from our previous post, we’ve been struggling with trying to understand just what the Maldivians are trying to say (to us, or to each other). We also discussed this while teaching our second batch of workshop students, the J-students at the college. The topic of our last day was clear communication and how important it is in news writing (you don’t want to bury the news in the middle of the story!).
The conversation went something like this:
- “Do we need to bring passport photos?”
- “No.”
- “Oh, we don’t need passport photos??”
- “Yes.”
Puzzled look. The immigration clerk looked at us from the other side of the counter.
- “Oh, so we DO need passport photos.”
- “No.”
She shakes her head.
- “Hum… you’re saying we DON’T need passport photos?”
- “Yes, you don’t.”
Come as a [...]
In between planning and conducting our workshops we’ve spent time getting to know the Maldivian media scene. After all, it’s important to for us to know what we need to emphasize in our media training workshops. We figured that the best way to do this is by talking with local journalist and others with knowledge of the field, so that’s just what we’ve done. Meetings, meetings and more meetings! It has been really interesting to hear how the media has developed in this country since freedom of speech was instigated here 1.5 years ago.
We just came across this article describing a trash island in Singapore (their version of Thilafushi, the Maldivian counterpart). Read through this article and marvel at the more environmental way the Singaporeans are disposing of their trash!
A handful are TV reporters for the national channel, TVM. Others are radio reporters and still others are senior political writers for major newspapers. All are, well, in their early 20s.
Meet the first class of Journalism students in the Maldives.
This workshop has been the most fun yet — we’ve had to pack years of training into one [...]
