On 19 January, at a press conference Foziljon Akhunov, prosecutor of Khatlon province declared the intention of his office to strengthen professional relations between his office and the media.
Akhunov says that the prosecutor’s office is planning to organize seminars for law enforcement structures, which – among other topics – will cover the issues of media regulation in the country and the problems of access to information.
NANSMIT monitoring service
The social media Web site AllVoices invites citizen journalists around the world to register on its Web site and submit entries. Contributors can earn cash rewards based on the number of views of their articles.
The site invites interested people to post a story, upload media or send text messages to the site. On AllVoices, users can market their content, share it with friends and earn cash up to US$10,000.
AllVoices is open to anyone passionate about reporting their opinions and views. To register and for more information, visit http://www.allvoices.com/journalism.
https://www.ijnet.org/ijnet/training_opportunities/citizen_journalism_platform_accepting_entries_off
The UK’s University of Oxford offers a funded fellowship programme for mid-career journalists at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. The fellowship scheme, sponsored mainly by the Thomson Reuters Foundation, enables visiting journalists from across the world to study in Oxford for a period of three to nine months.
Fellows enjoy an opportunity to critically reflect upon their profession by doing research on a subject of their choice under the supervision of an Oxford academic specialising in that area and to enjoy the breadth of academic, cultural and social life at the University of Oxford.
This is not a degree programme but an opportunity for journalists to engage in academic research of their
professional fields of interest.
For more information, please see http://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/fellowships/overview.html. Contact: reuters.institute@politics.ox.ac.uk.
https://www.ijnet.org/ijnet/advertisements/university_of_oxford_reuters_institute_for_the_study_of_j
The second Journalism Practice and Journalism Studies conference hosted by the Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies, will focus on the topic: The Future of Journalism. The conference, supported by publishers Routledge, Taylor and Francis, will take place September 9 and 10, 2009. Contributions are being accepted now from the international community of scholars of journalism studies as well as journalism practitioners, journalism educators and trainers, media executives, trade unionists and media regulators.
Proposals for Papers are invited on the following broad themes:
The Future of Journalism: Perspectives from different countries/continents)
The Future of Journalism: New media technologies, blogs, citizen journalism and UGC
The Future of Journalism: Business trends and developments
The Future of Journalism: Implications and developments for journalism practice
The Future of Journalism; Broadcast and print journalism
The Future of Journalism; the employment, education and training of journalists
The Future of Journalism; Journalism ethics.
Titles and abstracts for papers (250 words max) and proposals for panels of related papers, should be emailed by January 9, 2009, to Bob Franklin at journalismstudies@press.uk.net. Please indicate which of the seven key themes listed above your paper addresses. All abstracts and papers will be reviewed by a panel of specialists and members of the Editorial Board. A selection of papers will be published as special issues of Journalism Practice and Journalism Studies in April 2010. At the 2007 Future of Newspapers conference, 65 of the 110 submitted papers were presented at Conference and 27 were published in Journalism Studies and Journalism Practice.
For more information, go to http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/rjos and http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/rjop.
https://www.ijnet.org/ijnet/advertisements/call_for_papers_the_future_of_journalism_conference
Germany’s international broadcaster Deutsche Welle invites journalists from around the world to apply for full scholarships to study in Bonn, Germany, in a Master’s program in International Media Studies. Fifteen applicants from Africa, Asia, Latin America or Eastern Europe will be granted the scholarships. Deadline is May 31.
The program is a four-semester, full-time program. It combines topics including media and development, journalism, communication science and media economics, while helping students develop practical skills and competencies that are important in the world of media.
The program is a joint project of the University of Bonn, the Bonn Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Sciences and Deutsche Welle, with its headquarters in Bonn.
Applicants need a bachelor’s degree and more than one year of professional experience in a media-related field. As the Master’s program is bilingual, applicants must have good verbal and written communication skills in German and English.
For more information, visit the program’s Web site or send an email to Christoph.Schmidt@dw-world.de.
https://www.ijnet.org/ijnet/training_opportunities/international_media_studies_master%E2%80%99s_prog
The Washington, D.C.-based Fund for Investigative Journalism (FIJ) is offering grants, ranging from $500 to $10,000, to reporters worldwide working outside the protection and backing of major news organizations. Deadline: February 1.
Grants are limited to journalists seeking pre-publication help for investigative pieces involving corruption, malfeasance, incompetence and societal ills in general as well as for investigative media criticism.
Applicants must have a commitment to publish or broadcast the finished project, as well as a project outline detailing their plans for reporting the story, and a budget and a resume in order to apply.
Applications must be completed in English. The fund accepts e-mail attachments for applicants outside the U.S.
For more information, go to http://www.fij.org./grants or email fundfij@gmail.com.
https://www.ijnet.org/ijnet/training_opportunities/fund_for_investigative_journalism_offers_grants_f
Less that a month after covering Turkmenistan’s parliamentary elections, two journalists in the Central Asian country have endured a tough start to the new year.
Osman Hallyev, a correspondent for RFE/RL’s Turkmen Service in the country’s northeastern Lebap Province, was briefly arrested at the beginning of the month and says he has essentially been under house arrest since then.
His life, he says, has become depressing and unbearable. His phone line has been cut and his every movement watched.
«Wherever I go, I’m under surveillance, even if I go to a gas station,» Hallyev says. «If I visit my neighbors, officials contact them and ask why I visited them and what we talked about. It’s impossible to leave home — whomever I visit would be immediately interrogated by officials.»
And the harassment, Hallyev says, is not only confined to him. He claims that several family members, including his son and pregnant daughter-in-law, have been fired from their jobs.
Dovletmurat Yazguliev, another RFE/RL correspondent who covered the elections in Turkmenistan, was summoned in late December along with his wife and threatened by local officials in his native Ahal Province.
Since then, Yazguliev says, he has come under additional pressure from the authorities. Last week, he said he has come to realize that his continued reporting for Western media could lead to his imprisonment in Turkmenistan, where independent media is virtually nonexistent and free speech is not tolerated.
Targeting Journalists
While Turkmenistan is widely considered the most restrictive media environment in the region, journalists elsewhere in Central Asia experience similar difficulties.
In Tajikistan in the past week, another RFE/RL contributor, Abdumumin Sherkhonov, was beaten by three men — one of whom allegedly introduced himself as an Interior Ministry employee.
Two of the men have reportedly been detained by the authorities.
And in Kazakhstan, a journalist accused of publishing state secrets in his weekly newspaper is in custody after security officials escorted him from his hospital room last week to face charges.
Ramazan Esergepov, editor in chief of the «Alma-Ata Info» weekly, who was receiving treatment for high blood pressure and heart disease, is now being held in a Kazakh prison pending trial.
His wife, Raushan Esergepova, said her husband is being held handcuffed in solitary confinement, where he has begun a hunger strike.
«He has been taken from an isolated cell in the detention center to another cell without windows, he told me. There he got a kidney inflammation,» Esergepova said.
«It’s freezing cold in that cell, his hands have turned blue with cold. And he is constantly handcuffed,» she continued. «It really makes me angry — why should a journalist, an editor of a newspaper, be held handcuffed? Is it because they want to insult and humiliate him?»
Bringing Trend To Light
Although there are no obvious connections between the four cases, some see them as further evidence that the state of free speech and media freedom in Central Asia continues to deteriorate.
Elsa Vidal, the chief of the desk for Europe and former Soviet countries for the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders, says it was a «black week» for Central Asian media and a serious blow for freedom of speech in the region.
Vidal says that in Central Asia, «journalists can be attacked or assaulted because they have written a very specific article that is threatening the interest of a representative of the government or a local public servant.»
But Vidal adds that «more generally speaking, those who tend not to comply with intimidation, those who resist attempts to make them write what they don’t think they should write, all these journalists that are not serving the power,» can be targeted.
Reporters Without Borders has been trying to bring the issue of attacks on media freedom to the attention of influential institutions, such as the European Union, Vidal says.
It has repeatedly called on the EU to put pressure on Central Asian governments to respect their citizens’ rights to freedom of speech.
But many journalists in the region say not enough is being done, and express fears that Central Asia’s energy wealth may be the reason.
In numerous articles, journalists from the region have accused the West and the EU in particular of turning a blind eye to human rights and media-freedom issues.
Geopolitical interests and the growing need for oil and gas, they say, cause Western politicians to think twice before criticizing Central Asian governments. And governments in the region, the same journalists say, are acutely aware of their advantage.
RFE/RL’s Kazakh and Turkmen services contributed to this report
Farangis Najibullah
Источник: http://www.rferl.org/Content/A_Black_Week_For_Central_Asian_Media_Freedom/1369600.html
The BBC World Service will launch its new Persian television channel on Wednesday January 14, BBC Persian reported.
It will be the BBC’s second publicly-funded international television channel, after Arabic, and part of plans to improve Persian multimedia offerings.
BBC Persian television will be a daily eight hour service for audiences in Iran, Afghanistan, and the wider region, broadcasting at peak times for the market.
The backbone of the schedule will be news, together with a mix of current affairs, features and documentaries, culture, science, business and arts programs.
For more in Farsi visit http://www.bbc.co.uk/persian/iran/2009/01/090108_sh_ptv_launch.shtml. You can also watch BBC Persian’s promo on Youtube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnSYDbfBuE4.
https://www.ijnet.org/ijnet/training_opportunities/bbc_persian_tv_to_launch_january_14_1
The second Journalism Practice and Journalism Studies conference hosted by the Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies, will focus on the topic: The Future of Journalism. The conference, supported by publishers Routledge, Taylor and Francis, will take place September 9 and 10, 2009. Contributions are being accepted now from the international community of scholars of journalism studies as well as journalism practitioners, journalism educators and trainers, media executives, trade unionists and media regulators.
Proposals for Papers are invited on the following broad themes:
The Future of Journalism: Perspectives from different countries/continents)
The Future of Journalism: New media technologies, blogs, citizen journalism and UGC
The Future of Journalism: Business trends and developments
The Future of Journalism: Implications and developments for journalism practice
The Future of Journalism; Broadcast and print journalism
The Future of Journalism; the employment, education and training of journalists
The Future of Journalism; Journalism ethics.
Titles and abstracts for papers (250 words max) and proposals for panels of related papers, should be emailed by January 9, 2009, to Bob Franklin at journalismstudies@press.uk.net. Please indicate which of the seven key themes listed above your paper addresses. All abstracts and papers will be reviewed by a panel of specialists and members of the Editorial Board. A selection of papers will be published as special issues of Journalism Practice and Journalism Studies in April 2010. At the 2007 Future of Newspapers conference, 65 of the 110 submitted papers were presented at Conference and 27 were published in Journalism Studies and Journalism Practice.
For more information, go to http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/rjos and http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/rjop.
https://www.ijnet.org/ijnet/advertisements/call_for_papers_the_future_of_journalism_conference
Relations between the Russian Embassy in Tajikistan and Tajik media outlets have hit a rough patch amid a public and contentious spat that has played out in recent weeks.
In December, after the gruesome murders of two Tajik citizens in the Moscow region, several newspapers in Dushanbe accused Russian authorities of failing to uphold the civil rights of labor migrants, thereby leaving Tajiks laborers vulnerable to hate crimes perpetrated by criminal gangs and xenophobic nationalists. Adding further insult in the eyes of Tajik journalists, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov took steps in December to limit the number of work permits for foreign labor migrants. Tajikistan, with as many as a million workers in Russia, is deeply dependent on their remittances home.
Responding to the criticism on December 24, the Russian Embassy in Dushanbe sent a protest note to the Tajik Foreign Ministry demanding that authorities take measures to muzzle local media outlets. The embassy accused Tajik journalists of «deliberately» distorting facts, adding that «certain Tajik journalists had taken the liberty of insulting» top Russian officials.
Rather than curtailing the attacks of Tajik journalists, the Russian Embassy protest seemed to cause an intensification of the criticism. One headline, published in Millat Weekly shortly after the Russian Embassy note became public knowledge, blared; «[Russian political supreme Vladimir] Putin Speaks, a Skinhead Acts, a Tajik Dies.» Accompanying the article was a photomontage depicting Putin before a swastika and a prostrate young man performing a fascist salute.
The weekly Tojikiston played up a similar theme, publishing a photomontage of a neo-Nazi accompanied by a headline «Russians.»
Nuriddin Karshibayev, head of Tajikistan’s National Association of Independent Media (NANSMIT), a Tajik umbrella non-governmental organization comprising more than 30 media outlets, said the Russian Embassy was out of line to criticize Tajik coverage of attacks on migrant workers in Russia.
Russian diplomats have no right to «ask the [Tajik] government to take measures against certain private media who dared to express their own viewpoint about the brutal killing of our compatriots,» Karshibayev told EurasiaNet. NANSMIT runs a monitoring network and legal support centers to help protect Tajik journalists.
Sayofi Mizrob, editor of the private weekly SSSR agrees. «If the [Russian] embassy has facts of defamation or insult, it should approach a court,» he said.
In what some interpret as an insensitive response to the dispute, the Russian Interior Ministry released figures alleging the number of crimes committed by Tajiks in Russia has doubled in the past five years. The ministry also claimed the number of crimes against Tajiks fell by 10 percent in 2008, the Interfax news agency reported December 27.
In early January, the Tajik Union of Journalists and NANSMIT issued a joint statement calling for calm and mutual respect. But it remained firm on the Russian Embassy’s note: «The tone and contents of the note demanding ’the most urgent measures against the dissemination of such materials in the Tajik media’ are inadmissible; they contradict the international standards of freedom of speech.»
The editor of one newspaper in question, Kurshed Atovullo of Faraj, responded in an interview with the Asia-Plus news agency; «The Tajik newspaper Faraj has never published reports which give grounds for the Russian Embassy to make complaints.» He went on to suggest that «the Tajik Foreign Ministry should immediately send a similar reply note to the Russian Foreign Ministry, because there are lots of offensive reports in the Russian press about Tajiks.»
An allegation posted January 3 on the website of the Tajik Labor Migrants’ movement has further stoked passions. The movement claimed that a criminal group with police links in the Russian city of Astrakhan had taken fifty Tajik train passengers hostage while en route home. The Tajiks purportedly had violated customs procedures and the criminals were asking for a ransom of approximately $1,000 for each of the detained passengers, the website alleged.
Davlat Nazriyev, head of the Tajik Foreign Ministry’s Information Department, said that the Tajik Labor Migrants movement’s allegations could not be verified. The Tajik Embassy in Russia conducted its own investigation, he added, and found no truth to the hostage-taking claim.
The Tajik Prosecutor-General’s office calculates that the number of Tajiks who died in Russia in 2008 nearly doubled over the previous year, rising to at least 681. The deaths were connected with accidents on construction sites, as well as crimes, including hate crimes. Most of the deaths were not investigated. Because it is overwhelmingly dependant on the Russian economy, Tajikistan has little leverage to complain.
Editor’s Note: Konstantin Parshin is a freelance journalist based in Dushanbe.
Posted January 12, 2009 © Eurasianet
http://www.eurasianet.org
Konstantin Parshin, EurasiaNet
Источник: http://eurasianet.org/departments/insightb/articles/eav011209a.shtml