The future journalists of Timor-Leste: Job expectations, knowledge and skills on multimedia journalism

Abstract

In April 2019, Jakarta-based UNESCO with two lecturers from the Department of Communication Science at Universitas Gadjah Mada (UGM) and one researcher at PR2Media prepared a plan to hold multimedia journalism training workshops at the Department of Social Communication (DSC) of the Universidade Nacional Timor Lorosa’e (UNTL) in Timor-Leste (East Timor). This article describes the current aspirations of the trainees related to their future media and journalism career in East Timor as well as the reflective evaluations of the Indonesian trainers on the training complemented with students’ pre-test and post-test survey on multimedia journalism knowledge and skills. Participants on the multimedia journalism training carried out in July-August 2019 were adept with the required technological skills. Their biggest challenges came from basic language and journalism skills, such writing in good Tetum, Portuguese, Indonesian or English (in East Timor, Tetum and Portuguese are the official languages, while Indonesian and English were designated as ‘working’ languages), covering the stories, and presenting the stories in a journalistic style. Despite these challenges, they were finally able to produce basic multimedia stories with a local perspective on the designated news site.

Keywords

• East Timor
• journalism education
• multimedia journalism
• Timor-Leste
• UNTL