The training lasted for 3 days and covered topics such as: advanced online content editing, taking photos and photo processing, recording and processing audio news, creating video content, copyright, social media and local services for promotion. The trainings focused on the enhancement of skills and presentation of software and tools tailored to the needs of these media.
In particular, the training began with an education for work with the WordPress web-platform. Journalists learned the rules for writing and editing web news, and for embedding images and multimedia content into them. The journalist ethics and the rules for writing journalistic content were also discussed. These skills are expected to facilitate the work and the process of updating the content on their websites.
Then, each participant recorded his own audio recording and worked practically with the Audacity software in order to process it according to the specified parameters. During this session, participants were familiarized with the SoundCloud service as another way for publishing audio contents on the internet and for embedding them into their web-posts.
The beginning of the second day of the training was dedicated to the concept of copyright and the free Creative Commons licenses, arousing great interest among the participants and inciting a discussion about the state with copyright and its practical application in the digital context.
During the training, participants received guidelines for handling a camera and composition of a photograph, and they had the opportunity to take a few photos themselves. Then they processed the photos using Google Picasa, to prepare them for posting within their own news.
Throughout the rest of the day, journalists worked on video processing, using Windows Movie Maker for adding multimedia components to their news, and they were later presented with the opportunities offered by the YouTube service for posting and processing video contents.
At the beginning of the third day of the training, participants learned how to create slidecasts – a combination of a presentation (may consist of images or images and text) and audio background using the Slideshare service, which will be useful in cases when they will want to prepare a multimedia article for a certain event, from which they have no video material.
The last session was dedicated to the use of social media as tools to promote their media. The focus was put on the use of Twitter and Facebook for promotion of web content, interaction with the online audience and attracting a new one.
Finally, through exercises, journalists were able to practically apply the acquired skills with the assistance of the trainers.
With this training, the number of trained journalists reached 38. Metamorphosis continues with the implementation of these training sessions, and 6 more are to be held by the end of the year.
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