We’re pleased to announce that applications are now available for the U.S. Department of State’s 2012 Edmund S. Muskie Graduate Fellowship Program.  Application materials, including instructions and complete eligibility requirements, are online.

http://www.irex.org/application/edmund-s-muskie-graduate-fellowship-program-application

The Muskie Program brings emerging leaders in key professional fields from Eurasia to the United States for one to two years of graduate study at institutions across the United States.  Through their academic studies, internships, and community service, fellows develop connections with Americans and make direct linkages with American universities, businesses, social-service organizations, schools, and other institutions, allowing them to develop a deeper understanding of U.S. values and ideals, such as democratic leadership.

Feel free to contact us if you have questions.

On Saturday, August 27^th, at IREX Kazakhstan office in Almaty held a meeting with Bektour Iskender, representative of Kyrgyzstan media and co-founder of Kloop. Kloop is a news website, where everything is written by young and beginning journalists. Despite this, Kloop covers all of the most serious events happening in the country, and has become a unique product that is needed to everyone. The events covered include: Revolution of 2010, ethnic conflicts in Osh in 2010, all the elections, investigations about torture in the police and GKNB, also a lot of events related to social issues, technology development, and cultural events.

Kloop is sponsored by Hivos, and is created by the Kloop Media Foundation in partnership with the Children's Media Centre, an experienced youth media organization from Bishkek. Kloop Media is most famous for Kloop - news and blogging platform run by young people - and also for its Journalism School, one of the leading media education institutions in Central Asia.

Bektour started his presentation by talking about serious current problems in KG and KZ journalism, especially issues related to the lack of accuracy in preparing news, by showing real examples, when journalists did not check several resources before publishing the news and thus led to making readers doubt in credibility of famous KG and KZ informative agencies (Kazakhstan today, AKI press). He argued that journalists should be skeptical about any information they get, use critical thinking and analyzing skills and try to check information in details before publishing it.

He talked about ethics in journalism and especially noted that journalists should not support any conflicting sides in articles and try to be objective and unbiased in covering different issues.
Also Bektour shared his experience and ideas on proper usage of social networks while publishing materials. He shared with attendees information on Kloop’s sites in Kazakhstan and Tajikistan (www.kloop.kz and www.kloop.tj) , and interested young people were invited to write news articles for these portals as the Kloop’s main aim is to help young people be professional journalists and handle proper covering serious issues in their countries and thus foster development of citizen journalism.

Not only did Bektour show attendees different mistakes found on websites of inform agencies, leading newspapers, and magazines, but also shared his own experience in starting his career as a journalist in Central Asian country, all the challenges he faced and he gave practical advices and answered questions of people who came.