Last month some of the students of The Serbian web-journalism school met Tatjana Ćitić, the editor of the TV channel RTS (Radio Television Serbia) at the Fair of Brands. They had learnt the essential features of modern media technologies from her. She informed that after the activation of a new portal of RTS in November 2008, the internet traffic to the site has grown considerably.

On February 15th, Sandra Jakovljević conducted a session on Internet marketing, models and methods of online promotion. She taught them the necessary skills to achieve business goals on the Internet. She is a consultant on Internet and SMS Marketing and eCommerce.

On the same day the students had a practical lesson. From their project blog in Rising Voices:

They had to write their own news on the basis of CNN news about recent plane crash which took place in Buffalo, New York.

This post lists some of the students responses.

On the next weekend Lidija Kujundžić, a journalist, discussed with the students about the importance of teaser headlines in web writing.

Lidija explained that substance of teaser is in only one, first sentence. Students were informed how to „hook” readers with a lot of title examples. After that, they begin to practice.

On 28th of February Lijubisa Bojic imparted a lecture on creative commons. The slideshow can be found below:

The following week the students took their final test by attending the final day of the 37th FEST (film festival) in Belgrade. The idea was to do something creative for the final test. The performance of students during the final test represented 50% of the total marks.

The students had a task to create an editorial office. The editor had to be in the office and journalists had their duties: to choose one film to watch on FEST, to attend press conference etc. Later they had to write about film and to attend press conference of the film “Here and there”, where they’ve made audio and video recordings.

Students covering the Fest (Film Festival)

Dragan Milosevic writes:

Recorded so much, made two interviews and everything in “real time” general public was able to follow current events in the Sava Center on the Internet at www.webnovinar.org/demo.

Elected Editor, Bojan Cvetkovic, managed the whole reporting quickly and on the web page (blog) published events from the Sava Center as they were themselves members of the team on the spot.

The last day of the 37th FEST- slowly goes to the past, the past is history, and it now is an inseparable part of the students of second batch of Serbian Web Journalism School.

Compared to the other journalists present the students of the school did notably well. Read here summaries of what the students wrote.

Russell Gordon: Image by Goran Necin

Goran Necin reports that Russell Gordon, American photographer and reporter and a teacher of the Web journalism school spent 48 hours in detention in Serbia because of contempt of a court. Goran has published part of letter sent by Russell Gordon to his colleagues describing the human rights violation while he was imprisoned, which has been translated by Ljubisa Bojic in Global Voices.

Learn more about the school's teachers here. Here are the students' blog feeds.

Link magazine, published by Media Art Service International featured an article on the Serbian Web Journalism School and the translation can be found here:

Native journalists often remain without a job but online Journalism allows them to work for information portals.

The school blog also informs about a notable effort undertaken with the help of Provincial Secretariat for Sports and Youth in Novi Sad, Serbia and with collaboration of “Integralac - web magazine for young people”. It is a virtual web journalism school and already 15 candidates have been chosen for the course.

The success of the first two batches can be measured by the numerous mentions in the media and all these great efforts recorded in different sites as described above. Without any promotion campaign for the third batch of the Serbian Web Journalism school, candidates have started applying. The Head of the schools says:

They will have to pass entrance exams to check the level of knowledge of English, managing the Internet, as well as personal characteristics (commitment and initiative), crucial for the demands of the schools of web journalism.

The Rising Voices Grantee the Serbian Web Journalism School is teaching several interesting skills to the students. They learned how to draw up their maps using Google maps in order to illustrate a web-story. Here is the slide of the presentation (In Serbian language):

Using Google Maps student Bojan Velickovic illustrates a satirical suggestion of a new oil pipeline in Europe considering the current energy crisis:

The students were also taught the skills of searching contents from the web:

How to contact Bloggers? The goal of journalists is a collection of high quality and providing information as soon as possible. A good example is a web-portal “Global voices” for collecting valuable opinions and information that many international media use in informing the public.

Here is the link to the lecture slide titled ‘Citation of blogs and the media, “Global Voices Online” in the web-journalism‘.

After collecting the information there is a need to verify facts from online sources such as Wikipedia. They were also taught how to cooperate on a team work using Wiki:

“PBWiki” was presented as a concept for cooperation and team work. During the classes, the students wrote texts together by correspondence over “PBWiki”.

Professor Danica Radovanovic has given lecture on the possibilities and the advantages of Facebook. Students Dragan Milošević and Goran Necin have opened a ‘Group' called ‘Journalists in the network‘ in which they wrote:

Possibilities of Facebook are huge! Now I have even more friends on this Internet page…. The missions of this group are tolerance, connecting, socialising and (generating) new ideas.

Dragana Banković shows the popularity of the Facebook using a simple graph:

Goran Necin also posted in his blog an overview of the Serbian Blogosphere:

(The) Serbian blogosphere is one pretty lively and interesting place. Anyone can find something there. Like old culinary receipts that has been truly treasury of (not only culinary) knowledge.

Note: Here are some resources for online journalism at JPROF.

* Each student has a blog. They have to produce one post per week based on assignments. Feeds from their blogs are available on NetVibes, here.
* An online programme will be launched early in the new year, making use of web tools such as SlideShare.net, which will enable lecturers to embed their audio narration over presentation slides.
* A book on web journalism is in preparation, which they hope to publish it in few months.
* Bilingual lectures are planned for the second half of 2009.

Meanwhile the classes of the school are progressing well. American photograph and reporter Russell Gordon took a crash course on photojournalism for the participants.

Russel Gordon, photo by zikica.zivkovic

Some reactions of the students from the project blog:

Darko Nikolić wrote “photograph can sublimate creation of web-journalist making his work more special, and considerable.”

Students listening to Gordon's lecture. Photo by cbojan

Besides talking with Mr. Russell Gordon, students had a lesson to analyze economic situation of Serbia in relation to the countries in region:

Gordana Erić observed that Serbia is most expensive of all countries created on the region of ex-SFRJ. The prices of basic life comestibles are among the highest in the region.

Ljubisa Bojic conducted the lecture no. nine on role of photography in web journalism on December 27, 2008:

How to create a good photo? What are the possible use of photographs in the web-journalism? Students opened accounts in the social network “Flickr” to upload their photos.

They learned how to create slide show with the uploaded pictures and publish on their web sites. After that some students made web-comics with the help of the online service “Pimpampum”.

The students were also taught how to organize their sites using netvibes.

In a recent session the student journalists also engaged in a philosophical discussion on the topic “Lethargy that rules Serbia over the past several years”:

Gordana Erić believed that the main points of the lesson are the facts that society got into crisis primarily because of the bad educational system, unbalanced society qualities, and certain character lineaments of our people, among the rest the one which for all mismatches blame everyone else.

Katarina Jovanović said that Absolute Genius tried to explain with „selected” words that they should not only „stink and wait” anymore, but under lot URGENT to do something when it comes to their lives and surround.

Here are two films made after the discussion by Katarina Jovanovic and Miloš Kuks using photo, video and audio:

Thumbnail image by zikica.zivkovic

Some students of the second round of workshops of the Serbian Web Journalism School

Online journalism is defined as the reporting of facts produced and distributed via the Internet (Wikipedia). Traditional journalists often do not consider bloggers without professional practices as journalists. But, as of 2005, blogging has generally gained at least more attention and has led to some effects on mainstream journalism. Most Internet users agree that on-line sources are often less biased and more informative than the official media. Now a days professional journalists are also harnessing this powerful media. This school will help aspiring Serbian journalists to embrace web journalism.

You can learn about the curriculum of the Serbian Web Journalism School here. Basically the students learn here how to use blogs, edit their web contents, work with photo and video journalism, learn about podcasts, social bookmarking, social networking, etc. They also get familiar with cyber activism, online marketing and new media. All of these are done in 12 course modules in 12 weeks.

The second round of the workshop started on November 23, 2008. The participants of this round are mostly young postgraduates in journalism, political sciences and professional Serbian journalists. The brief profiles of the participants including pictures can be found here.

The Serbian Journalists Association and the Ministry of Culture of Serbia had approved grants for seven out of fourteen student journalists to compensate for fees and for those who are left without work for the workshop.

On November 29th, journalist Predrag Prokopljevic conducted a theoretical session about two forms in journalism: report and news and a practical session followed. Slavoljub Kacarevic, the chief-in editor of Balkan magazine, a Serbian e-zine did a lecture on how to take interviews.

On November 30th Ljubisa Bojic presented a short history of Internet and discussed about the civil journalism, new media, digital promotion, the use of Gmail, and opening blogs using Wordpress. According to their project blog in Rising Voices, the students were motivated to explore the web and create their first blogs on their own.

Here are the links of the new blogs created by these participants:

• Marina Obizajeva
• Dragana Bjelica
• Dragan Milosevic
• Goran Necin
• Milos Kuks
• Dusan Zarkovic
• Bojan Cvetkovic
• Gordana Eric
• Žikica Zivkovic
• Tijana Vlahović
• Dragana Banković
• Darko Nikolic
• Katarina Jovanovic
• Bojan Velickovic

This Netvibes page compiles all the feeds from the students blogs in Serbian language. You can use Google translate to read the contents in your language.

Here are some highlights in English from the student blogs. You will be amazed to see that how emphatically these students are expressing themselves with blogs using pictures and texts.

Russell Gordon in the Serbian Web Journalism School. Photo: Goran Necin

On December 6th, American photographer and reporter Russell Gordon gave his lecture on the subject “Media War - use and misuse of photography”. Read here about the presentation and the reactions of some of the students who wrote about it in their blogs.

After the presentation the students took an interview of Russell Gordon:

In the coming Sunday Russell Gordon is scheduled to conduct a crash course on photo journalism for the students of the web journalism school. Here are glimpses of the slides to be presented:

On December 13th The School of Web Journalism had one special guest: Mrs. Milica Stojković, a famous violinist and painter. She is 77 years old and the oldest but very active web-journalist in Serbia. Few months ago she had participated in the first round of workshops of the Serbian Web Journalism School and received a diploma being one of the most successful students. Integrating musical parts of big compositors and her paintings in oil, Milica Stojković can now create little master-pieces, musical and commercial videos, that can be used for publicity and announcement of musical events.

Here are details about her session on commercial videos and the bloggers take on her presentation.

The lecture slides are available here. Here are the slides created by the participants.

We hope that by using new media tools these web journalists will create a different culture in journalism in Serbia, built on interactivity with fewer rules and fewer limits.

Participants of the Serbian Web Journalism School Gaining Online Media Skills

The support from Rising Voices will allow the Serbian Web Journalism School to focus on “training the trainers.” The majority of participants in the program are journalists and professionals who want to gain new media skills, but as a Rising Voices grant recipient, Ljubisa and his team will now encourage their students to share their new skills with marginalized Serbian communities including the blind and orphaned youth.

The funding will also allow the Serbian Web Journalism School to purchase more digital cameras and pay a translator to make selections of the content they produce available in English on Rising Voices. Please join me in congratulating Ljubisa and the Serbian Web Journalism School for their hard work to make more Serbian voices represented online.