Tripoli, 4 April 2013:
The Minister of Culture, Habib Mohammed Al-Amin, and the Italian Ambassador in Tripoli, Giuseppe Buccino Grimaldi, have launched a multimedia journalism course, the first training project of the Libya Initiative.
The training is designed to enhance the professional skills of media activists who are already producing work. They will learn practical skills as well as ways to develop ideas and turn these into professional news stories and features.
The chair of the Libya Initiative, Bahia Kanoun, told the Libya Herald that the project aimed to explore different ways of achieving reconciliation through storytelling. She said the most successful way of doing this was with young people, adding that the participants were very excited about the project.
This particular training, Kanoun said, would cover different aspects of the media, to help produce “complete journalists” with a range of skills.
Places on the course were hard-fought for, with just 33 participants from across the country being chosen from over 100 who applied. “They are ordinary young Libyans who would never normally have this opportunity,” Kanoun said, “this is a once in a lifetime chance for them.”
Two Italian media experts, the filmmaker Antonio Martino and journalist Nancy Porsia will deliver the three-week training. This will start in Tripoli, then branch out into other cities in Libya, where trainees will develop their stories on location.
“I think it is fantastic to see young people from all over Libya talking and working peacefully with each other,” president of the Ara Pacis Initiative – an international NGO dedicated to ‘the human dimension of peace’ – Maria Nicoletta Gaida, told the Libya Herald: “They are totally focussed on healing and this is the best witnessing of what Libya wants to be.” She added that the readiness to forgive that she was seeing among the young participants could be a lesson for the whole world.
The Libya Initiative is founded and implemented by the Ara Pacis Initiative, in partnership with Mubadara Libya Assalam. The Libya Initiative multimedia training is sponsored by the Libyan Ministry of Culture and the Italian Foreign Ministry.
For more information, see: www.thelibyainitiative.org [/restrict]
