Saturday, August 27, 2011

Philippines: Journalists Learned About Conflict-Sensitive Journalism


Workshop participants
Veteran journalists of the Zamboanga peninsula and the island province of Basilan, in the southwestern part of Mindanao in the Philippines, learned about conflict-sensitive journalism during the “Seminar-Workshop on Peace Journalism in Conflict and Post-Conflict Areas” which was held on August 8-10, 2011 in Zamboanga City.
The workshop was conducted by the Asian Institute of Journalism and Communication (AIJC) in partnership with the Peace and Conflict Journalism Network (PECOJON), with support from the UNESCO Office Jakarta and UNESCO National Commission of the Philippines.

More popularly known as “peace Journalism,” conflict-sensitive journalism is described as “good journalism reporting on conflict.”



Attended by 14 print, radio and television journalists working for local, regional and national media agencies, the workshop was facilitated by PECOJON resource persons who shared conflict-sensitive journalism tools for conflict analysis as the basis for reporting on conflict and violence.

During the workshop, the journalist participants went out to the city to gather news and prepared news reports, in print or broadcast form, that applied the principles they had learned. Their outputs were critiqued for improvement by PECOJON and AIJC resource persons.

Rey Manriquez, a participant and news anchor of a local radio station in Ipil, the capital of the province of Zamboanga Sibugay, expressed enthusiasm for what he has learned in the workshop. “I will surely share the tools I learned with my reporters when I get home,” he said. (Ann Lourdes C. Lopez, Asian Institute of Journalism and Communication).

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