Dreams come true. Are they?

Life nowadays is rushing so quickly. Only a few month ago, I was at my university where we had presentation from «112 Украина» and a few days ago, I already went to their redaction for the Erasmus project «Meeting Media: Chances and Risks - a Ukrainian-German Experience». During the university presentation, I was thinking about applying on their program for students, because I fell for the way they portrayed their channel. Did it live up to my expectations? – Find out from the text.

It probably took us an hour to get to this place. After that, we were divided into two groups, because the redaction was not big enough for all of us. Having waited for 40 minutes after all those intense project days we were a bit tired, but still excited to visit that place. I was in the second group, so we had to wait first. Then we were guided to the redaction itself.

The redaction was made in two colors: black and red and looked really modern in spite of the lack of space the host was talking about. He told us that their aim was to make it as good as they could using as less resources as possible. He compared it to BBC saying that although their redaction is much smaller they wanted to concentrate on the technical capacity of those little rooms of «112 Украина» rather than just their size.

Any place in the redaction is studio itself, which means that the hosts can have online translations from any room if it is needed. Needless to say, that technology plays important role in the work of the channel. Once you enter the room, you see a lot of big screens with news on it, a bunch of microphones and other technological things.

The channel is famous for 100 % of its own content with 18, 5 hours of online translation. The amount of work that is done every day is insane here, which you can see just by standing in the redaction. Everything is happening so fast with people running from one place to another one for materials to be prepared in time. Consequently, everyone of us keeps changing their place, so that these people can continue doing their job as fast as possible.

At the redaction, there is a big wall with photos of «112 Украина» journalists. Not every one of them has a degree in journalism, but their work is truly something that makes the channel the way it is. Different kinds of people: the beauty queen, politicians, social activists etc. are all taking part in the development of the channel.

On the wall, we can also see some quotations about different kinds of journalism. My favorite one of them can be translated as: “newspaper teaches people about what they don’t know and to know about what they don’t understand».  That can be said about journalism on whole rather than newspaper in general. It means that journalism is not just about informing about different events, but also about teaching people to analyze information they get from media.

Having visited every room, we were encouraged to ask any questions about the channel. I asked them two. The first one was whether they were afraid of hacker’s attack that might happen on the Independence Day. Answering on the question the host told us about the recent massive provocation from hackers all over the country and how they dealt with it. Basically,  it took them half an hour to get rid of the problem without their computers being destroyed. Now they consider themselves prepared for the possible provocations.

 

The second question was about the program I wanted to apply for when they first visited our university. I am not disappointed in the channel and still willing to work on it because of its teamwork, working according to BBC principles of objective journalism and high technical capacity of it. So no, it did not live up to my expectations. It was much better and I am glad that we all could experience this together.