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.
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!).
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!
Little did we know beforehand what a tumultuous place the Maldives is, at least when it comes to politics. But these past few days we’ve become more immersed in the Maldivian politics than we ever wished for, and we can tell you one thing for sure –things are far from peaceful here!!
A few days ago we got word that the [...]
Yaaayyy!! Today was the last day of our first journalism workshop series. For the past five days we’ve taught media skills to the young staff of DhiTV, a local cable channel. The attendance varied from seven eager students on the second day to a mere two on the last hour of our last day (thanks Ina and Shifa for staying [...]
As you read this blog, you may be asking yourself, “So, what’s so special about the Maldives?” Well, come here and see it for yourself! But in case you can’t, you should read Mirva’s long-form article about the Maldives and how the little nation is dealing with climate change. The article was first written as the final thesis/capstone project for [...]
The other day we followed DhiTV’s star reporter, 23-year-old Bishara Hassan, on her video shoot to a local school’s science fair to see how she goes about her job. The kids, just 8 to 9 years of age, were super smart and had come up with creative ways to save the Maldives from climate change and other threats.
We really enjoyed [...]
