Online course for Mexican journalists covering drug trafficking
This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.
Journalists in Mexico can use all the help they can get when reporting on organized crime and the country’s drug-trafficking problems. Members of the profession who report on those issues are often threatened and sometimes killed.
As we reported earlier this year, some nonprofit organizations are helping out by providing on-the-ground training and survival tips. But if journalists scattered around Mexico can’t make it to class in the flesh, they can sign up for an online course the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas is running.
The course will be free to participants and take place completely online through the use of e-mail, Skype telephone conferencing, video lectures and other technologies.
Álvaro Sierra will be the running the training. He provides classes in how to cover armed conflicts at the United Nations’ University for Peace in San Jose, Costa Rica. He was formerly the editor of the editorial page of Bogota’s El Tiempo newspaper and a correspondent in Russia (1990-1997) and China (1998-2000). According to the Knight website, he has extensive experience covering armed conflicts as a local reporter and a foreign correspondent. You can hear him talking about the course here on a blog post on the Knight Center website.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
Video: Journalists are put through their survival paces during a training course just outside Mexico City earlier this year. Credit: Deborah Bonello