Garowe, September 15, 2018: Within the component “Somali Media Monitoring program (SMMP)” of the project “Promoting Safety of Journalists and monitoring Professionalism, Media Ethics and gender awareness in Somali Media, the training of 16 Puntland Media Monitors, selected to assimilate in the SMMP activities of the project, successfully completed the orientation and training on 13 September 2018 at the SAME Hotel in Garowe, the administrative capital of Puntland.
The SMMP is supported by the Free Press Unlimited (FPU) under the EU Aid grants and implemented by relevant partners in Somalia lead by Media Association Puntland (MAP) and have been commissioned to carry out a media monitoring program that will evaluate the quality of news reporting and ethical journalism in general and gender coverage in the media in particular. In Somaliland the media monitoring programs will run under the supervision of Somaliland’s Journalists Association (SOLJA) and in the South-central regions of Somalia under the Supervision of the National union of the Somali Journalists (NUSOJ). The SMMP will monitor forty (40) media houses drawn from Radio, TV and Newspapers operating and located in the South-central, Puntland and Somaliland.
On the Puntland Monitor’s recruitment, it was essential to ensure, in addition to the skills of the candidates, their impartiality and their absence in working with the Media fraternity in Puntland, all the successful candidates weren’t engaged to any media house. In this framework, through the many practical exercises, the training was used to also evaluate the strengths of each candidate in order to assign them to the suitable type of media.
At the opening of the orientation and training for the first batch of monitors held in Garowe, 16 agents selected to cover the Puntland media monitoring activities, the MAP chair officiated the inaugural session reiterated that the Somali Media Monitoring program is a much needed activity that will help improve the Somali Media’s content in terms of news-quality, ethics and Gender coverage.
‘’I believe that the media monitoring results will play a pivotal role in improving the contents produced by our media houses, the objective is to discover the gaps in our newsrooms in the three main areas that monitoring will focus namely News-quality, ethics and gender’’ Said MAP chair Mohamed Dahir Warsame
Over the period of the training (13 September 2018), the training was conducted by the Somalia’s Media Monitoring general Coordinator – Ibrahim A. Mohamed and the Puntland’s media monitoring coordinator – Naima M. Delef, both trainers were among the five participants who attended a TOT media monitoring training held in Nairobi, Kenya early this year, provided by the Media Monitoring Africa (MMA) facilitators appointed by the Free Press Unlimited.
The Puntland media monitors training provided participants with specific know-how in media monitoring methodology, and permitted them to become familiar with the design of the SMMP, as well as its technical aspects, objectives. It also introduced them to the best practices for analyzing media content with focus on the three main areas of news quality, ethics and gender that will the central focus of the Somalia media monitoring program.
A similar training for monitors that will support the media monitoring activities in Somaliland and in a South-central Somalia is scheduled to occur within this month.
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Photos of the SMMP Training
