PIA campus journalism trainings slated
The yearly Campus Journalism Trainings facilitated by the Philippine Information Agency (PIA) 6 are scheduled to begin last week of July till last week of August.
PIA-6 Director Atty. Janet Mesa said there will be four batches of trainings for incoming campus paper writers and advisers, which will begin with the regional college publications staff members scheduled on July 28-30.
For high school publications staff, the trainings will begin with those from the provinces of Iloilo and Guimaras and the city of Iloilo on August 9-11, and those for the provinces of Capiz and Antique will be on August 16-18.
The fourth batch will be for the participants from high schools in Bacolod City and Negros Occidental which will be held on August 24-26 in Bacolod City.
Mesa said there will be added features for this year’s training for the college level, like on-line journalism/blogging with SMART Communications and the production of Wall Newspaper in keeping with PIA’s bias for development communication.
She said the venture on on-line journalism with the support of SMART Com seeks to help student journalists get campus papers on line and be part of community of journalists.
For the Wall newspaper, campus publications are encouraged to produce and circulate them in target communities, with content focusing on developmental issues.
For this year also, Mesa said, all the batches will have special inputs on the concept and practice of Disaster Risk Reduction, in cooperation with the Office of Civil Defense (OCD).
The Campus Journalism Trainings will be steered by the theme: “Campus Journalism in the Realm of Community Development”.
The PIA has been conducting these trainings for over 30 years already. Its recent mandate is Republic Act 7079 or the Journalism Act of 1991 which necessitates appropriate journalistic skills training for those who manage school publications.
“Our journalistic trainings are our response to this law, because we believe that campus publications are fertile training grounds for future writers and they can contribute much to development, when properly oriented,” Mesa said. (PIA6/ESS)
