District Correspondents Capacity Building Workshop November 4,2023

Rural Media Network Pakistan (RMNP) organised one day ” District Correspondents Capacity Building Workshop” in Dar-e-Arqam School Dera Nawab Sahib on 4th November 2023 to foster reporting and feature writing skills as well as empower the district correspondents to achieve a professional standard in order to help them to fully realise opportunities of freedom of expression in digital era.

This training programe was especially designed for the members of Ahmedpur Union of Journalists AhmedpurEast (AUJ) as the Pakistani regional and national press suffers from the lack of professional capacities ,because of  lack of journalism training opportunities for working journalists outside the major cities.There are no opportunities for a professional experience exchange for district correspondents while they cover more than 65 percent Pakistani people who are residing in rural areas and small towns of the country.

Resource persons Nauman Masood Khan and Ehsan Ahmed Sehar lecturing in RMNP District Correspondents Capacity Building workshop.

Deputy Director Information Department Government of Punjab Lodhran district Nauman Masood Khan and President RMNP Ehsan Ahmed Sehar conducted six training sessions as resource persons. A total fifteen district correspondents working for print and online media were enrolled for this training workshop.Senior journalist Abdul Hameed Saqib performed as co-ordinator .

Resource Person Nauman Masood Khan writing on white board during his lecture.

Resource person Nauman Masood Khan conducted three sessions on what is news, source of news, types of news writing, the structure of news item, body of a news item, press release handouts, the art of interviewing, feature writing, ethics of journalism, the law and the journalist, maintenance of reference record. He also highlighted resources of news, crime reporting and political reporting. He told them technical aspects of crime beat and briefed them about precautionary measure of filing crime stories. After that a practical exercise was conducted and a crime story was formulated. RMNP Ehsan Ahmed Sehar in two different training sessions highlighted the security risks for journalists working in hostile environment and underlined the need of group safety and security. Among other things participants were taught about personal safety, pre-development planning, conflict management, dealing with hostile crowds and extremists besides reaction to shooting, checkpoints, abduction and basic first aid. Question and answers session was also held in which the participants put volley of questions about covering honor killing ,cross firing and sectarian conflict. A special press freedom monitoring session was also conducted in which participants learnt the techniques of monitoring press freedom violations and designing of action alerts. They were also briefed about the constitution of press freedom monitoring committees.

Deputy Director Information Lodhran district Nauman Masood Khan giving certificates to the participants of RMNP One day ” District Correspondents Capacity Building Workshop” held on 4th November 2023 in Dera Nawab Sahib.

Rural Media Network Pakistan distributed RSF handbook for journalists published by UNESCO in country language Urdu among all participants. Later on Deputy Director Information Department handed over RMNP certificates to participants Safdar Bukhari, Jamil Mehmood, Mummad Sajjad, Arshad Riaz, Imran Lar, Haji Mazhar Hussain, Rashad Mehmood, Mubashar Ahmad ,Dost Muhammad Qureshi ,KhalilurRehman Khokhar, Muhammad Rafiq Jhamat, Muhammad Yousaf Ghani, Shabbir Ahmed Qureshi , Abdul Hameed Saqib and Shehzad Razzaq.
Source: RMNP