Welcome!
Dear journalist, editor, activist, or NGO,
welcome to this course on Environmental and Climate Change Media Reporting in South East Asia.
These training modules have been made to enable you to make more professional, engaging, and in depth reporting about the biggest story of our time: The Climate change.
In an interactive form with the assistance of the best climate journalists and editors in the world we have composed a set of modules that will guide you on:
1) How to build up a strategy for your climate coverage
2) Tools to make the best investigative reporting on environment and climate change
3) Tools to make investigations and news stories into constructive journalism that can inspire and guide the audience to act
4) Inspiration and guides on how to collaborate with peers around the globe to give your stories outreach and impact
We hope these modules are helpful for your work and would love to hear your feedback or any additional thoughts and inspiration you might have about these topics. Please share those with us through Henrik Grunnet, hgr@mediasupport.org.
We can't wait to share all the insights from our experts on climate and environmental journalism with you. Before we get started, please read the following:
CODE OF CONDUCT
To complete this course it is important that we understand the following principles of journalism and abide by them throughout the program and our future work endeavours:
1. Be respectful- All correspondence on the course and in work thereafter should be respectful of all values, religions, customs, traditions, culture and ethnicities. Harassment of any kind will not be tolerated in any of the course communication, content or community groups. Journalists should ensure that the dissemination of information or opinion does not contribute to hatred or prejudice and are expected to do their utmost to avoid facilitating the spread of discrimination on grounds such as geographical, social or ethnic origin, race, gender, sexual orientation, language, religion, disability, political and other opinions.
2. Be independent- Create content that acts in the public interest and maintains its independence from governments, donors, corporations and political organisations, if not otherwise clearly stated. As a journalist you should not use the freedom of the press to serve any other interest and should refrain from receiving any unfair advantage or personal gain because of the dissemination or non-dissemination of information.
3. Be fair- Provide individuals or organisations the opportunity to respond to any claims or accusations you make in your reporting. Journalists should respect privacy and the dignity of the persons named and/or represented and inform the interviewee whether the conversation and other material is intended for publication. Show particular consideration to inexperienced and vulnerable interviewees.
4. Be accountable- Take the utmost care to be accurate and factual in your reporting, verifying work thoroughly before release. If any errors arise, take responsibility for your actions and respond swiftly with a correction.
5. Be considerate- With all sources and colleagues act with care and attention. Minimise harm caused by your reporting by showing compassion with all of your sources, with extra sensitivity for stories covering human rights violations. Protect the identity of sources when requested.
6. Be diverse- Champion unheard voices in your work, providing opportunities for communities and groups to share their stories. Make sure your content is representative of your audience and free of bias. Journalists should strive to ensure, through progressive targets, that women’s views and voices are equally heard and represented across all media. Journalists should strive for gender balance and to challenge gender stereotypes in and through their journalism.
7. Be Accurate- Make sure that all reporting contains facts that you as the journalist can testify to their origin. Respect for the facts and for the right of the public to the truth is the first duty of any journalist and verification of factual information should not be compromised for urgent or immediate publication.