novinari1The second training took place between April 20 and 22, in the premises of Channel 77 in Stip, and was attended by 11 journalists from its editorial staff. Immediately after this training, in the period between April 24-26 in the premises of Metamorphosis in Skopje, the third training was attended by 10 journalists from the editorial staff of the Sky portal and the editorial staff of Channel 77 in Skopje.

The trainings lasted 3 workdays and covered topics such as: advanced web content editing, taking photos and processing photos, recording audio news and processing them, creating video content, copyright, social media and local services for promotion. The trainings focused on improving skills and presenting software and tools tailored to the needs of these media.

In particular, the training began with education about working with the web platform Joomla. Journalists learned how to edit and publish news on their website, to enable better cooperation between the journalists, to facilitate their work and the process of updating contents on their websites.

novinari2Participants also had the opportunity to take several photos and work with the photo editing software ACDSee to create a photograph that they would then upload as part of their news, and were also familiarized with the popular service for sharing and storing photos – Flickr. Each participant recorded their own audio recording and worked with the Sound Forge software to process it according to the specified parameters. During this session, participants were also acquainted with the SoundCloud service as another way to publish audio contents on the web.

During the next session, reporters were trained on using Windows movie maker to create and process a video for adding multimedia components in their news, but they were also presented with the opportunities offered by the Youtube service for uploading and processing video contents. They learned how to make slidecasts using Slideshare – a combination of a presentation and an audio background, which would be useful in cases when they don’t have video material from an event.

One of the three-day trainings was dedicated to the concept of copyright and the Creative Commons licenses. During this session, journalists were introduced to the basic concepts in the field of copyright and their practical application in the digital context.

The last session was dedicated to the use of social media as a tool for promotion of their media. The focus was placed on using Twitter and Facebook to promote web content, interact with online audiences and attract new audiences. This session enabled participants to learn the basics of social media and internet marketing and how to use the acquired skills to promote their own or someone else’s content on the internet.

During these 3 days, journalists were able to practically test their newly acquired skills and to practice with the assistance of the trainers, and the training was closed with an exercise for repetition of all the learned things.

The training aroused great interest among the participants for their future inclusion in trainings organized by Metamorphosis, primarily due to the possibility for practical application of the acquired skills, and the desire to learn more about social media, promotion and marketing, taking photos and editing web content.

Metamorphosis will continue to conduct these trainings, so, by the end of the year, 7 more trainings of this kind will be held, with a program tailored to the needs of media’s editorial staff (total number of 10 trainings).

So far, a total of 29 journalists have been trained with the initial 3 trainings. During the first training held March 7-13 in the premises of the Metamorphosis Foundation in Skopje, a total of eight journalists were trained, coming from the editorial staff of Plusinfo and Portalb – the recently launched portal for daily news in Albanian language.

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