* Any views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Electricity went down just as we started on the most emotionally charged part of the training - a journalism ethics quiz. That’s right; even Thomson Reuters Foundation courses can be affected by nature. It had been snowing heavily in Podgorica for the previous 24 hours, but the power grid had held out. It collapsed in many parts of the city when the snow turned into a thunderstorm.
But the participants, 12 journalists from leading Montenegrin media outlets, showed no sign of using this as an excuse for an early finish of the course. Instead, we found a laptop with a charged battery and continued the quiz in nearly total darkness as the training room was in a basement.
The overall level of journalism in Montenegro appears to have improved significantly since I was last in the tiny Balkan state in 2003, but investigative journalism is still a rarity. Maybe because of this the participants in our three-day course were eager to put up with darkness, lack of fresh air in a basement room and other minor problems to see the whole programme through.
We managed to cover a lot of ground in three days, including two writing exercises, two editing stories, two presentations and eight discussions around handouts.
We ended the course with a quiz on professional and ethical choices facing journalists which certainly triggered a lively discussion.
