How Poles taught Ukrainian journalists to conduct investigations

Six Ukrainian investigative journalists returned from Poland with new materials and impressions.

During the internship, the participants could get acquainted with the experience of Polish colleagues and thus find the answers to their questions, the Independent Media Trade Union of Ukraine reports.

Editor-in-chief of the Human Rights Information Center website Iryna Vyrtosu was among the participants.

“My topic is non-discrimination and employment of people with disabilities. The Polish colleagues helped me much with contacts. In general, Poland has the same problems in this field, but the process of solving the problems has been already launched at least. I hope that their experience will be useful for us in addressing these issues. I liked quite a flexible schedule of this project as we were able to communicate with the colleagues, discuss the media issues, meet with experts on their subjects, and we had also enough free time to write our own materials and work remotely,” the journalist said.

Internship participant, journalist of the Radio Liberty Serhiy Andrushko also told about his impressions.

“I wanted to compare the work of the offices of the presidents of Poland and Ukraine, how much public information they provide, what are the procedures, and so on. Thanks to the Polish colleagues, I was able to talk with representatives of the Office of the President of Poland. They told me a lot of interesting things. In general, the dialogue, communication and the obtained information were the most important achievements of this internship,” Andrushko said.

The internship of the Ukrainian journalists in Poland became possible within the framework of the project “Polish scholarship for investigative journalists”, implemented by the Polish Journalists Association in partnership with the Independent Media Trade Union of Ukraine and the National Union of Journalists of Ukraine with the financial support of the Polish-American Freedom Foundation program “Transformation in the region” – RITA, implemented by the Education for Democracy Foundation.

After completion of the internship, each participant should carry out a journalistic investigation related to the Ukrainian-Polish topics, as well as two master classes for students of journalism departments of the Ukrainian universities. In addition, the final conference to exchange experience among the Ukrainian media representatives will be held in Kyiv in February 2016.

The internship participants were the winners of the Polish-Ukrainian journalistic contests of previous years.