NEWSLETTER 4 -- spring 2000

Jemstone Annual Meeting: senior media figures from every country of the Eastern Mediterranean plus Yemen, meeting in Cairo on the eve of the Mediterranean Development Forum, urged the European Commission to relaunch the Med Media programme or find other ways to fund media training and development in the region. They offered full support to the Jemstone director and staff in their discussions with Brussels and other organisations. Each of the partners at the meeting is to provide short proposals of activities they require and suggestions of alternative sources of finance for the network. Please e-mail your ideas to either tudor@jemstone.net or info@jemstone.net

Cambridge Fellowship: a Jemstone graduate Mustafa Seven of the Turkish News Agency has been awarded a Wolfson Press Fellowship, as advertised in this Newsletter a year ago.

Mediterranean Development Forum: besides bringing together well over 100 journalists from the region to attend this conference, Jemstone was also responsible for communications and media relations at MDF3 -- the MDF section of the Jemstone web-site has an archive of our output including the ‘MDF Despatches’ conference newsletter. Coverage of the conference in Egypt was extensive, the opening was the lead story in Al Ahram, it featured prominently on radio and TV and there were features on many of the key issues being discussed like corruption, the potential for an Arab Free Trade Area, stimulating entrepreneurship and e-commerce in the region -- visit www.elsouk.com.

MDF4: the fourth Mediterranean Development Forum will take place in autumn 2001 and we hope that the role of the media in development will be one of the main themes.

Existing projects: preparations continue for three workshops later in the year, following our successful independent journalism event in Jordan, funded by the Dutch Minister of Co-operation and Development. The next three will be in Yemen, Egypt and Palestine. The promised booklet on the Jordan workshop is being produced as a matter of urgency.

We are receiving strong support from several potential funders for our young person’s news and current affairs TV initiative.

The Mediterranean environmental journalists network, established after the Capri workshop, continues to grow and is moderately active; contact us if you wish to join.

Construction of our Jordanian development web-site, funded by the British government, has begun. Development of our web-site as a portal for Euro-Med media, is underway.

Past partners: if anyone has received a fax or e-mail from one of the former partners of the old Med Media project, Radio Netherlands (which withdrew from the network a year ago), then our reply is posted on the web-site. We have received many letters and phone calls of support. Thank you. We have remained active over the past year and have received finance from: the World Bank, the European Commission, UNDP, the Dutch government, the British government; also the BBC employs the director who is seconded to the project. We intend to carry on developing the network in line with the wishes of the many partners.

tl/12/3/00

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