About Media Helping Media

Radio training in Jaffna, Sri Lanka, image by David Brewer via Creative Commons
Radio training in Jaffna, Sri Lanka, image by David Brewer via Creative Commons

Media Helping Media (MHM) provides free training resources for all involved in the media in transition states, post-conflict countries and areas where the media is still developing.

The modules have been written by media professionals and donated free-of-charge. Many were written for training sessions delivered in the majority world.

The site aims to help journalists produce accurate, fair, objective and impartial journalism in order to inform the public debate.

In January 2018 the Fojo Media Institute agreed to host the site and adopt MHM as an official resource of journalism training modules.

Fojo’s mission is to strengthen free, independent and professional journalism, and, as such, is an ideal partner. Webmaster, communications specialist and journalist Anders Behrmann has been a great help on the technical side.

MHM has no political or financial backers.

The history of Media Helping Media

MHM was conceived in 2003 following a chat between two former BBC colleagues, David Brewer and Bob Eggington, who had worked together at the BBC’s political unit in London and were part of the launch team for BBC News Online. Both have experience as reporters and managers in print, broadcast, and online journalism.

In recent years David and Bob have been working in the field of international media development. They became involved in projects training journalists in basic journalism skills and helping media managers adapt to changing audience behaviour.

That work had taken them to countries where many were unable to pay for journalism training. Seeing the scale of the demand for training, they decided that there needed to be a site offering free journalism training modules written in simple terms and accessible to all.

Once the idea had been developed, David took on to build and launch MHM, with Bob offering help and advice along the way.

Reproducing content

All the text on MHM is released under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0. That means you are free to reproduce, adapt and share the material for non-commercial purposes as long as you credit the original source and provide a link to the original material.

All the images used have been released by those who took them under Creative Commons so that they can be used by others as long as attribution is provided.  The conditions vary, so in all cases if you want to reproduce an image found on this site you will need to contact the creator.

Mistakes

All we ask in return for using the training resources on MHM is to let us know if you see any errors. You can use the contact form accessed from a link at the foot of any page. We hope you find MHM helpful in your pursuit of journalistic excellence.

Authors

To find out who wrote a particular training module on Media Helping Media, scroll down to the foot of the page where you will find a biography box telling you about the person who contributed the piece.

Dates

The publication dates of training modules on Media Helping Media are not shown. This is because many have been updated and rewritten over the years. When a training module becomes out-of-date it is archived.

Media Helping Media is now active on Mastodon, and continues to share updates on social media.