Tim O’Connor has overall responsibility for ProMedia II program design and implementation in Ukraine. O’Connor has headed the IREX ProMedia program in Ukraine since April 1997. From 1994 - 1996 he was teaching in Kazakhstan as a US Peace Corps volunteer.

Peace Corps Online: Directory: Kazakstan : Peace Corps Kazakhstan : Web Sites for Kazakstan RPCVs: Tim O’Connor has overall responsibility for ProMedia II program design and implementation in Ukraine. O’Connor has headed the IREX ProMedia program in Ukraine since April 1997. From 1994 - 1996 he was teaching in Kazakhstan as a US Peace Corps volunteer.

By Admin1 (admin) on Wednesday, July 11, 2001 - 4:46 pm: Edit Post

Kazakhstan RPCV Tim O’Connor has overall responsibility for ProMedia II program design andimplementation in Ukraine



Kazakhstan RPCV Tim O’Connor has overall responsibility for ProMedia II program design andimplementation in Ukraine

Resident Adviser Tim O’Connor has overall responsibility for ProMedia II program design andimplementation in Ukraine. O’Connor has headed the IREX ProMedia program in Ukraine since April 1997. From 1994 - 1996 he was teaching in Kazakhstan as a US Peace Corps volunteer, and prior to that he was for 10 years a reporter and editor for The Kansas City Star and Times. He has a bachelor’s degree in journalism and has completed most of the coursework for a Master of Public Administration degree.

O’Connor has covered a wide variety of news and feature stories since he sold his first newspaper article at the age of 15, while still a junior high school student. He has written for suburban and small-town weekly papers, small- and large-city daily newspapers, local and national newspapers, and magazines. He has written news, features, sports, business and op-ed articles, and also has had dozens of news and feature photographs published in newspapers. He has reported stories from locations worldwide, including not only many parts of the United States, but Canada, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, France, Belgium, Northern Ireland, Australia, and the Pacific Islands.

As a staff reporter for The Kansas City Star and Times, he spent five years writing about education. He wrote not just about the broad political and legal issues embroiling an urban school system but about the schools themselves, the students and teachers and classes – topics important in the everyday lives of the newspaper’s readers. In Ukraine, this is exactly the type of reporting that ProMedia is attempting to teach to journalists. He also wrote about other events as diverse as the Bosnian war to rock concerts and local parades. As an editor, he was responsible for all aspects of the paper’s weekly travel section, and worked for a year as a copy editor for news sections of the paper.

O’Connor has lived and worked in the former Soviet Union for most of the past five years. From 1994 to 1996, as a Peace Corps volunteer, he taught English to primary- and secondary-school pupils in Zhambyl, Kazakhstan. During that period, he traveled widely in the five Central Asian republics of the ex-USSR. In keeping with the goals and traditions of the Peace Corps, he lived, worked, and traveled as the local citizens did, not on the elevated financial and comfort levels of an expatriate. He also learned to speak and read Russian.

In Ukraine, O’Connor has broadened the reach of the ProMedia program. Under his leadership, a new Information and Press Center in Simferopol was opened and staffed in September 1997, thus making the resources and programs of ProMedia available to the journalists of Crimea. The hours of operation of the Kyiv press center were expanded, as were the computer facilities and other resources available to journalists researching articles.

In 1998, O’Connor submitted a grant proposal to ARD/Checchi that resulted in a $100,000 grant to IREX ProMedia/Ukraine to expand its legal defense and education program. This program has offered legal training and advice to newspapers from across Ukraine, as well as providing legal defense to newspapers against whom lawsuits are being used as a means of harassment. He also has brought many new newspapers into the circle of those receiving assistance from ProMedia, including dozens of newspapers in smaller towns, where the local newspaper is the only one available, and has expanded the number and type of assistance activities offered by ProMedia.

During O’Connor’s tenure, IREX ProMedia has begun several new initiatives, including:

* sending individual journalists and media managers to more advanced newspapers in eastern or central Europe for hands-on training internships
* sending small groups of journalists and media managers to more advanced newspapers in CEE or Western countries for subject specific study tours, such as advertising sales, election-campaign coverage or newsroom management
* beginning a Weekend School for Young Journalists, at which two dozen regional journalists spend 24 days learning, practicing and discussing various aspects of their profession, including reporting and writing skills, ethics, legal issues, objectivity and fairness, and newspaper business topics. A similar program for newspaper editors and managers also was initiated
* publishing and distributing instructional handbooks for journalists or media business managers on topics including election coverage, newspaper design, advertising, legal rights and responsibilities of Ukrainian journalists, newsroom management and basic reporting
* providing newspapers with free-of-charge pre-publication review of articles, to cut down on the number of libel and defamation cases filed against the media
* bringing together advertising agencies and major advertisers to begin formation of an audit bureau of circulation
* providing assistance to Crimean Tatar publications, and offering training to journalists across Ukraine in covering ethnic-minority issues and conflicts

In the past two years, IREX ProMedia/Ukraine has developed strong ties with other media assistance organizations, including Internews, BBC World Service Training, European Institute for the Media and the Institute for Mass Information. In addition, IREX ProMedia serves as the local organizer in Ukraine for assistance programs of the World Association of Newspapers, as well as for programs funded by the Swedish International Development Agency and operated by Sweden’s Institute for the Further Education of Journalists. In all, cooperation with these organizations has added more than $200,000 to the programs ProMedia has offered in Ukraine.

IREX ProMedia/Ukraine also has developed and maintained relationships with several high-quality newspapers in eastern and central Europe, including Poland’s Gazeta Wyborcza, Latvia’s Diena and Lauku Avize, and the Czech Republic’s Mlada Fronta Dnes. ProMedia has sent Ukrainians to visit and learn from these newspapers, and has recruited professionals from those papers for training programs in Ukraine.

ProMedia also works with numerous trainers, many from eastern and central Europe, who have been able to impart new and valuable ideas and techniques to journalists and newspaper managers in Ukraine. Those trainers – all fluent in Ukrainian or Russian – include Katarzyna Montgomery, Olga Iwaniak and Edward Krzemien of Poland; Inese Voika and Aigars Stankevics of Latvia; Tatiana Repkova of Slovakia; Stefan Voss and Joachim Weidemann of Germany; and David Tuller and Christine Demkowych of the United States. These Western trainers not only speak Ukrainian or Russian but also have extensive work experience in Ukraine or other CEE/NIS countries.



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This story has been posted in the following forums: : Headlines; COS - Kazakhstan; Special Interests - Journalism

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