On June 21, the participants of the 21st Media Mobility Hub session began their two-week internship at leading Kyiv newsrooms.
It started with a media lunch where the Hub’s graduates Myroslava Tanska and Diana Bondarenko shared their successful internship experiences and offered practical advice to the Hub participants.
The gathering’s special guest was Iryna Slavinska, the producer at Radio Culture.
The producer spoke about the specifics of the Unified New TV marathon, newsroom work restrictions, and covering sensitive topics during wartime.
It’s wartime and obviously, there are things where we (journalists) hold back. Like the rule that nobody publishes information about what exactly a missile hit. Is that a constraint? Yes, that’s a constraint. Is it because the authorities require that? Apparently so. But this rule is essential to avoid helping the enemy adjust their fire.
Among the sensitive topics journalists should cover with caution, Iryna Slavinska named the information about the evacuation of people from the occupied territories and about killed Ukrainians, including the military.
Journalists had to deal with wartime policies back in 2014 when the war in Donbas broke out and the occupation of Crimea occurred … We know today that families should not learn about the death of their loved ones from the media. That’s when we deliberately don’t follow the standard of promptness.
The producer also emphasized the importance of creating new content because the consumption of news content considerably declined compared to the beginning of the full-scale invasion.
No one’s able to consume a lot of similar information. A person can’t be shocked all the time. It’s another nuance we should work on. We’ll have to achieve some normality even in wartime conditions.
The Hub participants will spend several weeks polishing their skills in creating high-quality and important content during wartime at the newsrooms of UA:PBC, Radio Liberty, Detector Media, etc.
