Trinity news has been awarded a grant from the Simon Cumbers Media Challenge Fund to send a delegation of reporters to New Delhi, India this December in order to report on education and development there.
The Fund is aimed at “assisting assisting and promoting more and better quality media coverage of development issues in the Irish media.” As a result of receiving the grant, Trinity News will send three journalists abroad. Luke Maishman, International Development Editor and Science Editor, will lead the delegation. Maishman spent three months last summer living and working in New Delhi.
Maishman travelled to India with the SUAS volunteer group. There, he spent the summer working as a teacher in schools in New Delhi. These schools will be visited again by the Trinity News team in order to report on the progress that has been made.
Editor of Trinity News, Martin McKenna will travel in his capacity as photographer. Mr. McKenna has previously studied photography full-time before he became a student in Trinity.
The third member of the party will be Catriona Gray, an experienced writer with Trinity News and editor of TN2 in 2007-8. All the members of the team have been nominated in the national Student Media Awards, though neither Gray nor McKenna have visited India before.
Editor Martin McKenna said, “I’m honoured and proud to be able to send a team of journalists on such an adventure. For a student newspaper to produce original international content is highly unusual.”
Trinity News joins the ranks of the Irish Times, RTÉ, Newstalk, the Irish Examiner, the Sunday Business Post and the Sunday Tribune as previous reciepients of grants from the fund.
During the trip, the team will blog daily on the Trinity News website at www.trinitynews.ie. Mixed media will be produced, including written articles and audio slideshows of still photographs. With the material that will be produced during and as a result of the trip, Trinity News will publish a supplement in Hilary Term on the topic of education and development in Delhi.
The Fund was set up in the memory of Simon Cumbers, who was murdered by terrorist gunmen while filming a report for BBC Television News in Saudi Arabia. The attackers opened fire on Simon and his colleague, BBC correspondent Frank Gardner, in a suburb of Riyadh in June 2004. Simon died at the scene and Frank was seriously injured.
In 2005, a little over a year after Simon’s tragic death, Minister of State at the Department of Foreign Affairs, Conor Lenihan TD, in close consultation with Simon’s wife and family, decided to establish the Simon Cumbers Media Challenge Fund in his memory.
Page 8: Extracts from Maishman’s experiences during his summer in Delhi, as well as more on the Simon Cumbers Media Challenge Fund
