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TOL is set to begin a two-year project next month, funded by the UN Democracy Fund, designed to diversify the information available to the citizens of Central Asia. It promotes the use of Internet media and new media/multimedia techniques to produce and distribute content that represents a real alternative to the government-dominated media. Journalists, NGO representatives, civic activists, and young people will take part in the region’s most comprehensive new media training program to date, which will include a training-the-trainers course, workshops, the region’s first Social Innovation Camp, distance learning, internships, and scholarships, all led by a mix of local experts and European trainers who will showcase the latest in Internet- and mobile-based techniques and tools for creating content. The competition for grants this year was stiff (1,966 applications were received and fewer than 65 short-listed), which makes us particularly grateful for this award. Featured Content Transitions Online (www.tol.org) often showcases the work produced through our grant programs. Some of the highlights from September include the following stories: 28 September 2010 23 September 2010 22 September 2010 17 September 2010 7 September 2010 2 September 2010
New Media for Social Justice TOL Executive Director Jeremy Druker served as one of four judges who helped pick the finalists for The French American Charitable Trust Social Justice Challenge, which seeks to award innovative projects that leverage web or mobile technologies to foster collaboration around social justice issues. NetSquared works to help nonprofit organizations and nongovernmental organizations harness the community empowering capabilities of the Internet to increase their impact and achieve social change. Since the spring, TOL and the Georgian Institute of Public Affairshave been running a program designed to encourage the adoption of new media among journalists and journalism students in Georgia, funded by the Open Society – Georgia Foundation. One of the most avid participants has been Nata Dzvelishvili, a 22-year-old journalist who attended an online media certificate course hoping to learn multimedia reporting skills to use in her work at Media.ge, a resource site for the Georgian media community. She had previously thought bloggers wrote only about their personal feelings and never thought of creating a blog herself. Prompted by a trainer’s comment that everybody knows something better than others, Nata decided to launch two blogs this fall on her hobbies: one about books and another about soccer. The books blogs receives about 100 visits a day and the soccer one about 60, healthy numbers for new blogs in a country where the blogging movement is only starting to take off. “For me this is not a profession. I’ve been leaving my comments before all over the places – forums, social networks, etc. Now I just put it all together and I enjoy doing it,” says Nata, who has been encouraging her fellow journalists to join her in the growing online community |
