Swedish FOJO Institute celebrates its 50th anniversary. Half of that time, it supports Belarusian media sector

Com­plete sev­er­al-week cours­es instead of one-time sem­i­nars

FOJO works togeth­er with part­ners both in Swe­den and around the world to strength­en and devel­op jour­nal­ism and the media — this way they can con­tribute to the emer­gence of a more demo­c­ra­t­ic and sus­tain­able world.

At the end of the 20^th cen­tu­ry, all eyes were direct­ed at the young East­ern Europe states formed after the col­lapse of the Sovi­et Union. In the late 1990s, the then head of FOJO came to Belarus to estab­lish rela­tions with the Belaru­sian mass media.

From that vis­it, close coop­er­a­tion between FOJO and BAJ began.

The Swedish Insti­tute for the Advance­ment of Jour­nal­ism offered edu­ca­tion­al pro­grams from day one. The dif­fer­ence from oth­er orga­ni­za­tions was that these were not iso­lat­ed one-time sem­i­nars, but entire cours­es last­ing sev­er­al weeks.

Par­tic­i­pants from Belarus stayed in Swe­den for a longer time. They were intro­duced to experts, promi­nent jour­nal­ists, and the insti­tute staff, and at the same time, they could vis­it var­i­ous Swedish media and see how Swedish jour­nal­ism works.

Grad­u­al­ly, in addi­tion to local pro­fes­sion­als, the Swedish orga­niz­ers began to invite experts from oth­er coun­tries to such meet­ings. This con­sis­tent and high-stan­dard 25-year coop­er­a­tion helped raise the lev­el of Belaru­sian jour­nal­ism.

Over two dozen local train­ers

With the help of FOJO, the Belaru­sian Asso­ci­a­tion of Jour­nal­ists pre­pared a pool of train­ers with­in the coun­try. BAJ iden­ti­fied expe­ri­enced Belaru­sian jour­nal­ists and offered them to share their expe­ri­ence with their col­leagues – not just com­pa­tri­ots, but also media work­ers from oth­er post-Sovi­et coun­tries. At the end of the 1990s, BAJ was quite active in estab­lish­ing rela­tions with them.

The edu­ca­tion of media train­ers last­ed about 3–4 years.

After­wards, with some two dozen local train­ers in place, the Belaru­sian Asso­ci­a­tion of Jour­nal­ists has had no prob­lems con­duct­ing its train­ings and edu­ca­tion­al pro­grams.

Being one step ahead of emerg­ing pop­u­lar trends is FOJO’s dis­tinc­tive fea­ture. The Swedish Insti­tute is con­stant­ly mon­i­tor­ing trends, so our edu­ca­tion­al pro­grams were shaped based on cut­ting-edge tech­nolo­gies.

Thus, the pro­gram on con­ver­gent media was being imple­ment­ed for sev­en years in the 2000s. The train­ers warned region­al and nation­al media about the advent of web jour­nal­ism. It was to come for­ward draw­ing back print edi­tions, so it was nec­es­sary to rebuild the usu­al work process­es of edi­to­r­i­al teams. The Belaru­sian media own­ers at that time were sure that if pub­lish­ing pays their bills, there was no need to change any­thing.

As part of the pro­gram on con­ver­gent media, empha­sis was placed on high-lev­el man­agers with an intent to edu­cate them about the web news world and con­vince them that it should be devel­oped. More­over, there was an edu­ca­tion­al pack­age for mid­dle man­agers, so that they could lat­er take care of new depart­ments because one per­son could no longer run the web­site and the print­ed ver­sion of a pub­li­ca­tion and engage in busi­ness man­age­ment at the same time. Media own­ers start­ed train­ing assis­tants to del­e­gate some of the tasks.

Togeth­er with FOJO, BAJ man­aged to real­ize many of these ideas.

The pro­gram helped increase the resilience of inde­pen­dent media: in the event of the arrest of an own­er, the mid­dle man­age­ment would prop­er­ly orga­nize the work process, and the media would keep work­ing in an ordi­nary course.

To a large extent, thanks to the fact that the Belaru­sian media sec­tor final­ly believed in web jour­nal­ism and began to devel­op it, it was able to meet the chal­lenge when the print edi­tions were hit and the oppor­tu­ni­ty to print news­pa­pers was not there any­more. Many inde­pen­dent region­al media have sur­vived as web edi­tions.

Adap­ta­tion to Belaru­sian real­i­ties

The Swedish Insti­tute orga­nized pho­tog­ra­phy and video cours­es, pro­grams on niche spe­cial­iza­tions, genre jour­nal­ism, and jour­nal­is­tic ethics for Belaru­sians.

Dur­ing the 25 years of coop­er­a­tion between BAJ and FOJO, all edi­to­r­i­al teams of inde­pen­dent media have been part of these edu­ca­tion­al pro­grams in one way or anoth­er.

FOJO did not lim­it itself to inde­pen­dent jour­nal­ists and sought to estab­lish rela­tions with the entire media sec­tor of Belarus, so at least one-third of the state media out­lets attend­ed the Swedish cours­es. Joint groups were arranged, when rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the inde­pen­dent and pub­lic sec­tors went on edu­ca­tion­al trips togeth­er.

FOJO col­lab­o­rat­ed with the Jour­nal­ism Fac­ul­ty at Belaru­sian State Uni­ver­si­ty, try­ing to make it more open, demo­c­ra­t­ic, and pro­gres­sive. In the ear­ly 2010s, FOJO invit­ed jour­nal­ism teach­ers to Swe­den and orga­nized joint stu­dent-teacher groups.

Thanks to splen­did part­ner­ship rela­tions, all pro­grams were adapt­ed to Belaru­sian real­i­ties. If BAJ saw that the sched­ule includ­ed train­ers or experts who were far from under­stand­ing the local con­text, it asked part­ners to adjust the pro­gram. Part­ners from FOJO fol­lowed suit and some­times could even change pro­fes­sion­als.

Long-term coop­er­a­tion has proven to be fruit­ful. It gave a lot both to indi­vid­ual Belaru­sian jour­nal­ists and the inde­pen­dent Belaru­sian media sec­tor as a whole. To a large extent, today’s resilience of Belaru­sian non-state media, as well as the absence of pan­ic reac­tions that could arise in the sit­u­a­tion in which edi­to­r­i­al teams found them­selves after 2020 should be cred­it­ed to FOJO and BAJ’s coop­er­a­tion with the Insti­tute.

A quar­ter of a cen­tu­ry has passed, and on the day of FOJO’s anniver­sary, we are hap­py to rec­og­nize that the coop­er­a­tion between BAJ and FOJO con­tin­ues.