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Training day on 27th March

A new intake of reporters is now linking up with mentors to provide stories for New Australia Media and for Leader Community Newspapers.

More than 20 recruits, from diverse backgrounds, recently attended a training day where they discussed negative media coverage of their communities and suggested stories they would like to investigate with the help of journalist mentors.

The aims of New Australia Media - in giving a voice to young people from refugee and migrant communities and helping to make the mainstream media more multicultural - were discussed.

The training day, held at the Queen Victoria Centre in Melbourne on 27th March 2010, created new friendships among participants.  Two young men, who had been in the same refugee camp in Thailand met for the first time. The Karen-Burmese refugees, Tu Tu and Thein Htee Ang, swapped stories of their life in the Mae La camp and their recent arrival in Australia.

Magealena Attian, who came to Australia from Sudan, wanted to know why the mainstream media misrepresented people from her community.  She wanted to know if all journalists working in the Australian media were biased.

Others wanted to know how to have their story on the front page, what sorts of stories should they cover?  New Australia Media wants stories that touch people, that surprise and delight them.

New Australia Media stories provides something 'new'- something fresh, something unique that has not been heard, seen, or read before.  Our reporters may know about it, but the rest of the community does not.  We want to hear that story and share it with others.

We want to explore stories about families and individuals, triumph, sorrow and new beginnings.  And those stories need to come from the heart but be written with the head - strong sentences that build on each other to create the story.  They can be stories about life in Melbourne; the culture shock and the pleasure associated with arriving in Australia.

Wesa Chau, who joined New Australia Media last year, told the group how her mentor Hugo Kelly had helped her establish an organisation to represent international students.  She said that Mr Kelly explained how the media worked, edited news releases and offered guidance in preparing opinion pieces for daily newspapers on issues of concern to the International Students Association.

Our new reporters from Karen, Sudanese, Congolese, Iranian, Afghan and Indian backgrounds will work one-on-one with experienced media mentors.  While the reporters will improve their skills of writing in English, their mentors gain a personal understanding of the difficulties faced by migrants and refugees in making a new life for themselves in Australia.  The latest media recruits have been recommended by various community organisations including the Centre for Multicultural Youth, the Adult Multicultural Education Service, and the Springvale Community Aid and Action Bureau.