Fostering free press abroad

Posted on Sun, Feb. 19, 2006
FIVE QUESTIONS
Fostering free press abroad

John Virtue, director of the International Media Center at Florida
International University, has been training Latin American journalists
for 17 years.

Q. What does the center do?

A. We started off training Central American journalists in the late
1980s using grants from the U.S. Agency for International Development
and then expanded to Latin America. We have trained more than 8,000
working journalists in Central and South America so far.

Q. How are the courses taught?

A. Most of the training is done in the journalists' home countries. We
teach writing, reporting, editing, newsroom management, ethics and
print, radio and television work. My specialty is ethics. There are 10
textbooks written in the students' languages.

Most of our students are mid-career journalists. We offer intensive
two-week courses. Fifteen of our graduates are now the editors of their
newspapers. We began a master's program in journalism; 30 journalists
have graduated. Some of them have become journalism professors in their
home countries.

Q. You also train journalists in Cuba, right?

A. Yes. In 1990 the Independent Journalists Movement began in Cuba.
Using USAID funds, we began offering five courses in Cuba in 1999. It
was difficult. We couldn't mail the course work directly to Cuba.

After trying several other countries, we succeeded in mailing it from
Canada because I have dual Canadian-American citizenship. I mail the
course work to someone in Canada who then sends it to Cuba.

In 2002, we held a clandestine workshop in Cuba. That partly led to the
arrest of 75 dissidents, including 27 journalists, in 2003 because there
was a spy among the students. We now give video conference workshops at
the U.S. Interests Section. They are very effective. We have registered
207 journalists in Cuba. Nearly a hundred are actively writing there,
another 50 write sporadically. About a dozen are in prison, and 35 are
now in exile.

Most of the students weren't working journalists when they began
writing. They were lawyers, agronomists, economists, etc., who got
active and turned to writing.

We work with the CubaNet website, picking up stories and circulating
them in the hemisphere. We offer up to 10 articles a month.

Q. Would you say the Cuba training is succeeding?

A. Well, before this, the news publications in Central and Latin America
had no credible reporting sources in Cuba. Now they do. Our biggest
success is Claudia Marquez. Her opinion columns have been published in
The New York Times and other major American outlets, rare for the Cuban
writers. She was a 22-year-old secretary when she took our training. But
the government imprisoned her then-husband, Osvaldo Alfonso, and
threatened to take away her son because of her work. She has gone into
exile in Puerto Rico.

Our goal is to create many more Claudias and Claudios.

Q. How did you come to the center?

A. I did something that seemed like a good idea at the time. I quit my
job as editor of El Mundo in San Juan on principle but without having
another job to go to. What happened is that a new publisher came on
board who did not believe in independent newsrooms. I fought him for 10
months and then resigned. I was a hero in the newsroom for about two
days, I'd say.

After that, I worked at The Miami News during its last 10 months in
existence. After that I came to the center at FIU.

Editorial Board member Kathleen Krog prepared this report.

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/editorial/letters/13903811.htm