This year-long project will give advanced multimedia skills to Roma and majority community reporters in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria, promote cooperation between them as well as produce a significant amount of media content. Donor: Open Society Foundation Media Program, Erste Foundation, and the Embassy of the United States, Prague, Czech Republic

Objectives

We will build on our last project, Colorful but Colorblind,(http://roma.glocalstories.org/),  by supporting a group of the most advanced and committed participants of the previous cycles of the project by providing them with training, reporting, and publishing opportunities. Other objectives are to provide participants with training aimed at consolidating their multimedia storytelling skills and to publish content by trainess and other reporters in order to increase the awareness of major issues facing the Roma in Central and Eastern Europe. Objectives also include to improve the capacity of senior trainees and their respective media organizations to monitor the Decade of Roma Inclusion. Another objective is to increase Roma representation in the blogosphere and use blogs to call attention to issues affecting Roma on a daily basis.

Project Activities

The project will include six principal activities: the orientation workshop, reporting trips, the production of multimedia stories, individual journalism projects, dissemination, and blogging. The two-day orientation workshop will be aimed at refreshing skills and will be held in each of the five countries, with participants working with two trainers. Each trainer will then join one team, composed of one Roma and one majority-community journalist, for the reporting trips. The teams will then return with the “raw” footage and work in the offices of the project partners to produce their stories under the guidance of the trainers. In the final stage of the project and as an ultimate test of the acquired skills, the teams will be required to conduct two additional reporting assignments on their own, with distance support from the trainers and using the equipment owned by Transitions and its partners. At this stage, the teams will also edit their stories on their own. As the project will result in high-quality content on Roma issues—totalling 30 multimedia stories first to be published on Transitions and partner websites—we will again be putting in place a wide-ranging promotion campaign to ensure its re-publication in traditional and online outlets in the five target countries and internationally, as well as screenings at festivals and public events. In addition, and to increase representation of Roma issues by Roma journalists in the international blogosphere, we will continue publishing Transitions' Roma blog (http://www.romatransitions.org/blog). 

For more information about TOL's other current projects, please click here.

Updates

High Praise

 More accolades for Transitions' Colorful but Colorblind multimedia project arrived last month in the form of special recognition by the European Union's vice president, Viviane Reding, who is also the EU's justice commissioner. In a press release, Ms. Reding highlighted the success of the project after it received a prestigious 2010 Society of Professional Journalists Sigma Delta Chi award for excellence in journalism in the Digital Media Presentation (Independent) category:
 
“I am proud to see an EU-funded project countering age-old prejudices against Roma receiving acknowledgement across the Atlantic. This proves that the European Union's unprecedented efforts and commitment to promote the social and economic integration of Roma are paying off. Roma people contribute to social and cultural life all over Europe and I am happy to see that their contribution is acknowledged by the 'Colorful but Colorblind' project.”

The project is aimed at remedying anti-Roma stereotyping through the creative use of multimedia in reporting minority issues in new member states of the European Union in Central and Eastern Europe (Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia) and internationally. The project’s training and production components were designed and implemented in cooperation with the Knight Center for International Media at the University of Miami School of Communication.
 
In recent weeks, the Czech weekly Respekt joined other media throughout the target countries that have shown the videos. The videos dealing with the Czech Republic were viewed more than 6,000 times through Respekt's website.

The project is co-funded by the European Union’s Fundamental Rights and Citizenship Program, with further support from the OSF Media Program, the Embassy of the United States in the Czech Republic, the British Embassy in Prague, and the Knight Center at the University of Miami.