 |
Dr. Tudor Vlad and Dumitru Tira, director of Publika TV, in a workshop with other news producers and journalists. |
Associate Director Assists Moldovan Media and Plans Workshops
Dr. Tudor Vlad, the associate director of the James M. Cox Jr. Center for International Mass Communication Training and Research at the University of Georgia, worked with Moldovan communication experts and journalists in February in Chisinau to design the goals and the curriculum of a new non-academic school for journalists and communicators.
He also conducted a workshop at the TV news channel Publika.
Dr. Vlad met with Dumitru Tira, director of Publika, George Saghin, executive director of the Assocation for Development and Cooperation in Moldova (ADC), and Daniel Diviricean, president of the Institute for Evaluation and Strategy of Moldova, and talked about the launch of the school in May in Chisinau.
The launch of the new schools will coincide with a workshop organized by the Cox International Center on how new technologies have created new categories of communicators.
The U.S. experts participating in the program will be Dr. C. Ann Hollifield, head of the Telecommunications Department in the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia, Owen Ullmann, editor of U.S.A. Today, Dr. Lee B. Becker, director of the Cox International Center, and Dr. Vlad.
The school in Chisinau will focus mostly on broadcast and Internet journalism and will involve new categories of communicators, such as bloggers, community journalists and citizen journalists.
"The news channels have changed the concept of news and the story ideation and production process," Dr. Vlad told a group of reporters and producers who participated in a one-day workshop on routines to generate news for television.
The workshop was hosted by Publika TV, the only news channel in the Republic of Moldova.
"It is not easy to generate story ideas and to make them into news almost all day long, seven days a week, but the most dangerous approaches are artificially sensationalizing the news or, even worse, fabricating them," Dr. Vlad said.
"Sooner or later, we will all realize, I hope, that credibility is a fundamental media value," Dr. Vlad told the group.
While in Chisinau, Dr. Vlad met with staff of the U.S. Embassy and told them about the most recent findings of the Cox Center's Annual Surveys of Journalism and Mass Communication, which focus on enrollments in journalism and mass communication programs in the U.S. and on the success of those graduates in the job market.
Dr. Vlad also met with Todd Benjamin, who worked nearly 26 years at CNN in London, Tokyo, New York and Washington as an anchor, correspondent and financial commentator. Benjamin was in Chisinau to participate in the affiliation of Publika to CNN.
On his way back to the United States, Dr. Vlad made two stops in Romania. In Cluj-Napoca, he participated at the launch of the Transatlantic Institute for Public Management and Sustainable Communities at the Babes-Bolyai University. The Institute is a partnership between Babes-Bolyai and Michigan State University. The Romanian rector invited the University of Georgia to become a partner in this project.
In Bucharest, Dr. Vlad met with Dr. Nicoleta Corbu, dean of the College of Communication at the National School of Political Studies and Public Administration, to plan a workshop for May. The workshop will focus on the impact of new technologies on the media landscape.
The Cox Center is a unit of the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia.
