Summer placements in media outlets provide equal opportunities to both students and the media: they can either formally part (having signed a formal paper for the university) or try to get maximum professional benefit out of it. Students can get practical skills in professional journalism while media outlets may benefit from creating an atmosphere encouraging new ideas and can select people who can be entrusted with some professional tasks in the future. 

 

Efficient ways to organise work with students and generally with beginners were in the highlight of a seminar Working with Students and Beginners in Media Outlets which took place on June 18-22 in Kyiv under Development of Media Skills Project. The trainer – Sergiy Tomilenko, editor of the Nova Doba newspaper (Cherkassy) worked according to a program developed for the similar seminar held last year together with Elizabeth Robson, a respected BBC journalist (London).

 

According to Sergiy Tomilenko, working with beginners or students will be most successful only if media outlets introduce special placement programs aimed at active cooperation among editorial management, beginners and their mentors from the staff members.

Main stages of such placement are:

w                Introduction to the media outlet (from everyday things to editorial policy);

w                Assigning mentors chosen from experienced  staff members (for the first couple of days a beginner would just observe the mentor working, then during a week or so they get some basic tasks from their mentors);

w                Beginners undertake professional tasks working mostly on their own.

 

Participants in the seminar who were mainly representing regional media from Uzhgorod, Crimea, Kremenchuk, Mykolaiv, Melitopol as well as from Kyiv – Novy TV channel and CJSC Segodnya - have developed tasks for beginners, recommendations on ethical and editorial standards and developed student placement plans for their media outlets.

 

Besides, the participants looked at radio BBC experience of working with beginners (presented by Project media-expert Andriy Kulykov) and that of Novy TV channel (field trip session hosted by editor Volodymyr Mzhelsky).