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LA JOLLA – ScienceWriters Eric Frost, director of the Visualization Laboratory at San Diego State University, explains new technologies that help scientists predict and understand climate change to a groups of journalists attending an Institute of the Americas journalism workshop on covering natural disasters. Photo credit: Luis J. Jimenez magazine singled out the Institute of the Institute of the Americas’ Jack F. Ealy Science Journalism workshop, now in its seventh year, for its role in training more than 150 Latin American journalists.

“In addition to access to cutting-edge research, participants build a network of contacts in the region and receive a solid grounding on a variety of green issues,” ScienceWriters Editor Lynne Friedmann wrote in the Summer 2010 edition of the magazine.

Friedmann quotes Nicolas Luco, science and technology editor for the Santiago, Chile, newspaper El Mercurio, which has sent two reporters to prior Ealy workshops.

“As an editor, I must say they returned reverberating enthusiasm, thrilled at having been exposed to top science labs and scientists and delighted with the colleagues they meet,” Luco said.  “The journalists gained in experience, contacts and, mostly, in outlook. Thenceforth, they took more risks in reaching out internationally; a great plus in their publishing.”

Friedmann reported on the rapid expansion of the Institute of the Americas’ journalism training program over the past two years, noting that the range of subjects now includes investigative journalism, digital reporting, pandemic preparedness, natural disaster coverage, climate change and freedom of expression and the rights of journalists in Latin America.

“In recent years, the number of IOA professional journalism workshop offerings has increased significantly under the direction of veteran newspaper journalist S. Lynne Walker,” Friedmann wrote. “One of Walker’s goals is to capitalize on the IOA’s strategic location, just 30 miles from the U.S.-Mexico border.  With that in mind, the first workshop she organized was The Migration of HIV/AIDS, which included cross-border visits to medical clinics in Tijuana, Baja Mexico.”

Friedmann noted that one participant of that first workshop, reporter/editor Erika Cebreros, received a Northern California Ethnic Media Award for a series of stories based on interviews she conducted during the workshop.

After completing the digital reporting workshop in March 2010, a journalist from Nuevo Laredo redesigned his on-line news site; two Colombian journalists returned to Bogota intent on organizing an association of young journalists who are making the transition from print to digital reporting; and a Venezuelan journalist held his own digital reporting workshop in Caracas to share what he had learned with his newspaper colleagues.

“Latin American journalists use the word ‘hunger’ for professional training,” Walker was quoted as saying.  “Like every journalist in the world, they want to tell their stories better and more effectively.”

To read the story published in ScienceWriters, click here