Half Year Report 2016
Internews Ukraine: Developing With Media
Ukraine is changing, and Ukrainian media are changing too. Many of them, including those in the regions, are developing new techniques and approaches, trying to improve their professional standards. “Internews Ukraine” makes an important contribution into the country's dynamics, in particular helping media to reform and better respond to today's challenges.
Our activities from January to June 2016 reflect these efforts.
Since the beginning of the year, 2,677 people benefitted in total from different training and educational activities held by “Internews Ukraine”. We have held 114 intense courses, master classes and workshops in various fields. Our topics included EU integration, media literacy, reporting standards, digital security, decentralization, internally displaced persons, online journalism and many others. Our leading trainers and experts spent more than 500 hours on these events.
Explaining the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement, its implementation, opportunities and challenges, remains an important activity of “Internews Ukraine”. We have held dozens of trainings for journalists, as well as events for students and entrepreneurs, to achieve this goal.
Apart from learning, motivation is also an essential part of Ukrainian media development. Therefore, in January-June 2016 “Internews Ukraine” has provided grants for the development of 58 regional media. In addition, we held five national thematic competitions for journalists focused on such topics as EU-Ukraine Association Agreement, life stories of people affected by war in Eastern Ukraine, fight against corruption in Ukrainian regions, and decentralization.
Geography of organization`s activities went far beyond the capital city. Our events covered 80% of Ukraine’s territory. 30% of our projects were focused on media from Eastern and Southern Ukraine.
“Internews Ukraine” has also created new socially important content. In these products we tried to give people motivation to act. In January-June 2016 we have created motivating videos, such as “Study in Europe and come back”, “Europe starts with you” (only the latter was seen in Facebook by more than 750 thousand people), as well as a series of documentaries “Return” about the war veterans.
We also paid important attention to success stories of various Ukrainian citizens. In particular, together with regional journalists, we have told dozens of stories of Ukrainian internally displaced persons who found a new life, as well as of Ukrainian owners of small and medium businessmen who have managed to enter the EU markets with their goods and services.
Another achievement was a creation of verify.org.ua lifehack — a web site that helps to check the credibility of media content and to resist political propaganda.
This year our reputation and organizational capacities were once again confirmed by Deloitte, the international audition firm. We have implemented 10 large-scale national projects with international support.
Our communication projects opened new possibilities for journalists and civil activists, as we held visits to European countries, conducted a training course on anticorruption investigations and implemented other initiatives. In particular, we organized several study tours for activists from Russia within “Ukraine through my eyes” project, in order to overcome Russian propaganda`s myths.
We kept developing ourselves together with Ukrainian media. The number of our donors, new projects and target audiences has grown significantly. Since the beginning of 2016, our team has also grown by 30% to match the increasing number of external challenges.
More people get interested in updates of “Internews Ukraine” in social networks, as evidenced by a 20% increase in the number of our followers and subscribers on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram. Such growth of attention to our work led us to an idea of a series of regular informal events for media, so that we could become closer to our friends in media and communicate with them more often.
This is what we are proud of today. More to follow…
