Media Toolkit: Helping Journalists Get The Story - And Get It Right

This interactive toolkit offers a detailed description of a journalism training project called Women’s Edition - a global journalism project and model designed to increase and strengthen reporting on population and reproductive health in Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, Latin America, and the Caribbean.

Established in 1994 by the Population Reference Bureau (PRB), the programme has worked with hundreds of journalists to help them understand issues related to population, reproductive health, and gender status, so that they can report on them accurately and comprehensively. The print and online articles and broadcast programmes they produce following the training are meant to shape the public discourse on these issues and effect policy change. As stated in the toolkit, PRB produced this toolkit to "showcase our efforts so that others who want to engage with the news media can learn from our work and expand the reach of this successful media training."

In brief, the training process described in the toolkit involves the gathering of as many as 15 senior-level female journalists from developing countries for a two-year programme that includes four weeklong seminars, the first one in Washington, D.C., and the following three in other countries. It looks, for example, at how candidates are selected, how the seminars are run, the importance of taking journalists into the field through study tours and site visits (with examples of tours in South Africa, Ethiopia, and Jamaica), and how to increase journalists' ability use data and research in their work. It also offers information on the different training models they used to adapt their approach to regional and country levels.

In addition to a full section on lessons learned, each chapter highlights a lesson learned. The guide also contains links to workshop and event agendas, as well as links to articles that have emerged out of the training process. At the end, the guide offers downloadable samples of presentations used in the training to teach journalists about reproductive health, using data and research, and writing editorials, as well as links to reproductive health-related websites for further information.

The guide is divided into the following sections:

1. Training Journalists
2. Selection of Journalists
3. The First Seminar
4. Interactive Sessions and Open Discussion
5. Study Tours and Site Visits
6. Where We’ve Been
7. Back in the Conference Room
8. Other Training Modules
9. Sponsoring Supplements
10. What Have We Learned
11. Sample Presentations
12. Resources