INDEPENDENT MEDIA CENTRE KURDISTAN

IMCK Director Julia Shaw was in Erbil last week to train 233 Assaish officers to be. The participants belong to the Council of Ministers, Security Agency, General Directory, Assaish in Erbil. During the two days Shaw talked about the roles & responsibilities of the media and security forces in a democratic society and about how media and security forces can interact.

While it is getting warmer and warmer outside, we hit off our training for photojournalists in Sulaymaniyah this morning. The training is organized together with STATT, the main subject is illegal migration, how to use that subject as a photo journalist and another question that is discussed during the training is 'how do you turn global, international, news into relevant local stories?' It is a 2 day workshop that ran in Erbil yesterday and the day before and is now repeated in Sulaymaniyah. The trainer is Hossein Fatemi, an Iranian photographer who is based both in Tehran and London and whose work includes international photo journalism in Somalia, Mogadishu, Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan. Goran Lohan from STATT attended both workshops to give a presentation on the subject of illegal immigration. More pictures of these two trainings are to be found on Facebook .

IMCK cooperated in a 4 day training to enhance basic journalism skills, together with the Chaldean Writers and Press Union. The training was last week and after the 4 training days, 16 participants happily graduated. More pictures of this training can be found on Facebook .

IMCK celebrated her fifth birthday on a sunny Thursday afternoon with balloons and cake. For more pictures of the party, take a look on Facebook .

After an intense training week, the Storymaker training in Erbil came to an end. The nearly twenty participants went home to practice what they have learned. The training was all about the application Storymaker with which you can make items with your mobile phone. It is all about the combination of image, sound and a good story! After a month the participants will return to IMCK and we will discuss the stories they have been making. We can't wait to see what they come up with! Good luck to all storymakers! More pictures of this training can be found on Facebook .