* Any views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.
It was just the most desired ‘call’ from a distant global city - London. It was such a surprising call that made my long-cherished dreams come true, which had remained a distant dream to me. The call was from the Thomson Reuters Foundation confirming I was selected to participate in their Financial and Business News course in London. Certainly, that was the best news I had received in a long time because I love to learn and interact with experienced journalists from the globe to enrich my journalistic ability. I finally reached London, such a wonderful city, more importantly, I not only got two wonderful teachers – the 2Rs – Roger and Richard but also brilliant fellow participants.
The entire week brought the best opportunity in my short journalistic career - news writing techniques, playing with news and numbers, interaction, identifying major mistakes in the story, writing strong and meaningful intro (lead), proper use of ‘quotes’, thinking of questions for press conferences, sharing experiences with the top executives and senior Reuters journalists, visiting the London Metal Exchange to see live trading and exciting group discussion—a compact but productive week.
Though it was a tight programme, I never felt bored for one moment because, Roger and Richard made the entire course interesting. I salute both the teachers. I loved their teaching techniques and if I could I would love to attend such programmes 100 times! The tips the two trainers gave are helping me to reduce embarrassing errors. They made sure I covered all the basics in news reporting and during the lectures. They also gave me some pretty good advice on what to keep in mind while reporting. The course was truly a unique experience, and has had such a huge impact on me. Now every time I face a problem in reporting I ask myself: how would Reuters deal with it? I feel I always get my answer. I think I’ve become more thorough, checking names and numbers, trying to get as many sources as I can while working on a story.
One thing I want to share with you is we don’t have a separate business desk where I work right now but I am sure the tips that I’ve taken back with me from this course and what I am learning from the ongoing modules will help establish such a desk. I feel Bangladesh needs to focus more on micro-level business reporting to help economic journalism flourish in the country. We mainly do economic reporting from a macro-level perspective but it is time to focus on micro-level aspects as well. So, the tips from this course and Reuters guidelines will also help me a lot in the coming days. Now I dare to be part of the new horizon in economic journalism in my own country. I again salute the entire Reuters team and of course the caring duo - Tracy and Belen.
