The ninth India Technical and Economic Cooperation (ITEC) training programme for selected media and allied practitioners is underway in Kolkata, India.
The programme- News and Current Affairs using State of the Art Tools Iteration II- which began on Monday, July 1, 2024, is being organized in partnership with the Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute (SRFTI) in Kolkata.
Financed by the Indian government through the ITEC, the three-week programme will offer participants the opportunity to acquire new skills, build capacities and share ideas and network.
Each participant is expected to create their own short news bulletin at the end of the course.
The areas of focus for the training include the foundational tenets of news reporting and journalism ethics, interviewing techniques, examining different news styles, and exploring various news platforms, as well as the ethical challenges in Artificial Intelligence driven news.
The program also includes practical instruction that will provide participants with firsthand experience in a news studio setup and enable them to acquire production control abilities through targeted practice.
In all, eleven participants from Armenia, Botswana, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Fiji, Ghana, Guyana, Kenya, Nicaragua, Peru, and Syria including the Ghana News Agency’s Nii Martey M. Botchway are participating in the training programme.
Welcoming participants to the programme, Prof Samiran Datta, Director of the SRFTI, said the course had been tailored to help participants develop creative ideas for audio-visual storytelling.
He noted that the faculty members of the institute were people with experience, in-depth knowledge, and skills on the various subjects, and urged the participants to take advantage of the opportunity and make the most of it.
The Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute is a Central Autonomous Institute under the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting.
Named after the legendary Indian film maestro, Satyajit Ray, the Institute has emerged as a national center of excellence which offers post graduate programme in cinematic studies.
The Indian Technical and Economic Cooperation Programme is a bilateral assistance initiative of the Government of India that focuses on addressing the needs of developing countries through innovative technological cooperation.
The programme, which covers over 160 countries across Asia, Africa, Latin America, Central and Eastern Europe, as well as Pacific and Caribbean nations, has since 2015 trained over 225,000 professionals from around the globe.
