Reporters presenting their work to their colleagues in journalist training session, Yemen Times, Sanaa. Photo: IMS

On-the- job training for reporters at Yemen Times in Sanaa has fostered new innovative features that will benefit the readers, and provided a brush-up in the basic skills of reporting in practical exercises filled with laughter and smiles

Over the course of a ten-day in-house training, reporters atYemen Times in Sanaa took training in basic journalistic principles and learnt to work with a new news concept: "News You can Use'. Within this framework, thetraining focused on introducing the theories behind this news format as a meansto develop reader-friendly content and applying the format in articles to the Yemen Times, the first English-spoken newspaper in Yemen.

During the training, the reporters also trained their interviewingskills, worked on storytelling models and were trained in identifying local stories based on the global agenda of events, issues and reports. 

The training took place in the offices of Yemen Times andran for 3-4 hours in the morning as well as the afternoon. In between, the reporters would file stories as usual to Yemen Times, which is issued onMondays and Thursdays. This gave the reporters ample opportunity to put thetheories taught in the meeting room to work immediately and to get feedback from the trainer and discuss lessons learnt. 

Despite the long hours, YT reporters committed and engaged wholeheartedly in the training. 

"It is really useful to apply the training in our work, Ilearn a lot, said YT reporter Almigdad Dahesh Mojalli. " 

New feature developed for YT 

As an integrated part of the training, Yemen Times developeda new feature for the paper in the form of a box called "4U". It will contain user-friendly advice which is to accompany "news you can use-stories". 

"News You Can Use" is a new idea. I like it because I thinkYemen Times will get more readers this way, says feature editor, Mohammed Al-Jabri. 

After only three days of training, the first articlefollowing the new concept hit the news stands. The story, which was done by YTreporter Hamed Thabet called on Yemeni people to take better care of thehistorical sites around the country. The 4U-box introduced a poll among readersto list the top ten historic sites in Yemen and send their response to Yemen Times. 

Later in the training, one Yemen Times reporter filed astory about how a growing number of senior citizens in Yemen are left withoutany care because younger generations move to the city to find work. Thus theyleave their elders behind in the villages with no financial support breakingwith the tradition of previous generations. 

Accompanying the article was a "4U" box, which was used toask the readers to state who, in their view, should care for Yemen's senior citizens in the future in order to raise public debate around this issue inYemen. Depending on the responses, this would provide new material for newstories within the subject, which had been determined by the readers of the newspaper. 

Over the course of the training, the reporters at YemenTimes also took time to discuss with a native Dane the professional aspects of the notorious Danish Cartoon of Prophet Mohammed, which gave rise todemonstrations in Yemen and other Muslim countries when published in a Danishnewspaper in September 2005. 

Investing in training 

The training was sponsored jointly by IMS and Yemen Times.Responding to the question, why Yemen Times spend money on training, thepublisher and Editor-in-Chief of Yemen Times, Nadia Abdulaziz Al-Sakkaf said: 

"We want to invest in our reporters because they need to be the best. As one of the few independent newspapers in Yemen, we depend on producing quality work to our readers, otherwise we are put out of business." 

Much to the credit of the management of Yemen Times,training is seen as an investment and offered as a way to attract skilledpeople beyond the limits of salary budgets. 

It is, however, as if Yemen Times seems to be punished forits visionary investment strategy: During the week of the training, twowell-skilled staff members quit to pursue better-paid jobs with foreign institutions. Last year, seven reporters were headhunted to join primarily international organizations and companies in Yemen. 

The Yemen Times training was carried out by Lotte Dahlmannwho is an IMS staff-member with a background in communication with the UN andin reporting for print as well as radio media in Denmark. It marked theintroduction of IMS' involvement in the new phase of the bilateralDanish-Yemeni media programme from 2007-2009, which was initiated by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 2005.