U.S. Consulate General, Kolkata Training Program for Journalism Standards and Ethics

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The U.S. Consulate General, Kolkata will host a year-long training program in East India that will focus on journalism ethics, standards, citizen journalism, and advocacy through reporting. The three-tiered program will bring U.S. experts to speak and work with editors, advertising managers, mid-career journalists, and journalism school curriculum developers. The awardee will work together with Indian journalism school sub-awardees in Kolkata (West Bengal), Guwahati (Assam) and Patna (Bihar). One significant purpose of this grant is to strengthen the connections between American and Indian journalism schools and journalists. At the end of the program, U.S. and Indian journalists and journalism professors will work together on a white paper of recommendations on how to improve India’s ranking on the World Press Freedom Index. The first tier of the training program will bring U.S. newspaper editors to work with their Indian counterparts about best practices, and common challenges. Local, vernacular papers would work with equivalent smaller city or town newspapers from the United States; whereas larger English dailies would work with editors from larger newspapers from the United States. Editors from U.S. papers would discuss larger issues of journalism ethics, as well ongoing career development for mid-career journalists. Editors from smaller U.S. papers would be charged with discussing how they cover international affairs and foreign policy in their local editions, and the role local papers have in educating the public about local, national, and international issues.In order to improve standards and ethics within advertising departments, and improve the relationship between advertising managers and editorial staff, the second tier of this program would bring U.S. experts from leading news outlets to teach best practices in objectivity and how to maintain profitability. Management could work together on strategies on how to retain credibility when new media and citizen journalism is increasingly popular. Lastly, managers would discuss the best ways to recognize self-censorship to appease advertisers.The last tier of this program would also include U.S. journalism programs partnering and working with graduate and postgraduate communications and journalism curriculum development. Although this tier of the training program would be focused on developing better curriculum, the larger goal would be to build linkages between U.S. and Indian degree programs, such as executive education programs, or online coursework for mid-career journalists. (Please refer full announcement).

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