Season’s greetings from Prague and Transitions (TOL).
 
With 2014 right around the corner, we wanted to let you know about an amazing opportunity for your students to personally take part in commemorating some of the 20th century’s most historic events: the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the changes that swept through the countries of the Soviet bloc.
 
To mark the 25th anniversary of that monumental era, TOL will be offering a special one-month course (June 22-July 12) for aspiring foreign correspondents, modeled on TOL’s renowned foreign correspondent training course.  In the process, participants will fan out into the region to document the successes and failures that have shaped the transition since 1989. Stories deemed suitable by our editorial team will be packaged as a series and rolled out on on our flagship newsmagazine throughout the fall, in time for the anniversaries across the region and reaching a large international audience.
For more information and to sign up for updates, please visit this link.

And for those who can’t make it in June, we will be offering our traditional summer courses:
A great introduction to international reporting, this Prague-based course teaches participants how to carve out a place in a changing, but still fascinating profession and make it work financially.  Course participants will be trained by highly experienced foreign correspondents and complete a real-life reporting assignment under their guidance that can generate an invaluable clip for an early-career journalist. Trainees will also learn how to shoot illustrative photos to accompany their articles, an essential skill in a profession that increasingly values multimedia proficiency. The course has a credit value of 6 ECTS credits (3 U.S. credits).

Created by one of Central Europe’s leading travel writers, Mark Baker, this intensive, Prague-based course will review the major forms of commercial and non-commercial travel writing in today’s market. Lectures aim specifically at helping participants to identify the different forms of writing, improve their writing skills, and help them to develop their own careers in travel writing. By the end of the course each participant will have a piece of professional writing suitable for publication. The course has a credit value of 6 ECTS credits (3 U.S. credits).


Lastly, we are still accepting applications for internships at TOL’s home office in Prague for spring and summer 2014! Interns work at TOL’s flagship publication, Transitions Online, a leading Internet newsmagazine covering Central and Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and the former Soviet Union. The experience resembles an international newsroom and quickly gives students knowledge of the issues and events shaping the post-communist region, as well as news clips to use for further employment.
 
We would appreciate greatly if you could forward this email to students who might be interested and print it out and display the email on an appropriate notice board.
 
Thank you for your time and have a wonderful holiday season!
 
Best regards,
Jeremy Druker
TOL Executive Director
Transitions


Transitions (TOL) is a non-profit organization established to strengthen the professionalism, independence and impact of the news media in the 29 post-communist countries of Europe and the former Soviet Union. Toward that goal, we run a combination of journalism and media education programs, and publish the newsmagazine Transitions Online.