Egyptian Reporters Discover America

Shannon York
These Egyptian reporters are spending two months in the United States in intensive journalism training.

A group of 15 print journalists from Cairo has gotten a deep immersion in American journalism. The 13 women and two men were participants in an international journalism and media management training program run by Internews and Western Kentucky University (WKU). Participants arrived in Bowling Green, Kentucky in late October for the eight-week program.

The training was designed to expose the journalists to some of the top journalism educators in the country by tapping into the award-winning journalism school at WKU, along with regional and national media experts.

There was some culture shock for these reporters who came from Egypt's teeming capital, home to 16 million people, to Bowling Green, where the entire population, the group joked, could fit on a city block in Cairo.

The US-based program offered more than training for these professionals. There was also the chance to learn from Americans about America. Each of the participants was assigned a host, someone from the WKU community who helped them get around town, and introduced them to family life in the US.

Among the stories these reporters covered was the historic gubernatorial election in Kentucky, an event that left a lasting impression on many of them.

“Covering the local elections was a new experience for me," said one of the participants. “It was a great experience to visit the courthouse and then the Democratic headquarters and report on all the contradictory reactions to the results.”

In the final week of the first phase of the training, the participants put out an online newspaper. The Pharaoh Times can be viewed on Western's Public Broadcasting website.

Creating a functioning newsroom and producing the online paper under real deadlines was key to getting ready for the second phase of the program: three-week internships at midsize American dailies in the Midwest and South.

The final phase of the training was a train-the-trainers program, where the journalists were given the skills needed to impart the lessons learned to their colleagues back home.

To select the Egyptian journalists from a pool of over 150 applicants, Internews worked with the Al-Ahram Regional Press Institute in Cairo. In 2004, two more groups of Egyptian journalists to WKU for the training.

As part of this project, Internews and WKU will develop a new university curriculum for journalism schools in Egypt in partnership with Misr University, American University Cairo and Cairo University.

Since starting the USAID-funded program in 2001, Internews and WKU have also trained groups of radio journalists from Indonesia and Cambodia. The radio training project included follow-on training in-country training.