
Sixty years after it was founded Thomson Foundation - now joined by the Berlin based Thomson Media, continues to innovate. Its blended approach to life-long learning supports and inspires journalists and media organisations worldwide.
As part of our 60th anniversary weve caught up with some of our alumni to find out what impact our training has had on their lives.
Ibrahim Hamidi Ibrahim Hamidi says that joining our summer training course in Cardiff in 2000 opened up the world to him. He is currently the Executive Editor at the London-based political news journal, AlmajallaAR and AlmajallaEN, and a Senior Diplomatic Editor for Asharq Al-awsat News.
What was inspiring was that you mingle with other journalists from around the world. That was the first wake-up call for me, you have to look beyond Syria to understand the whole world Ibrahim Hamidi is the Senior Diplomatic Editor for Asharq Al-awsat News.
KC Saranga Founder of ADA DERANA Mojo Force in Sri Lanka, KC Saranga first came to the attention of Thomson Foundation when he entered our Mobile Journalism (Mojo) competition in 2019.
Now General Manager - News & Current Affairs at TV Derana, he is also leading the Mojo Lanka Academy, a virtual training centre for mobile storytellers.
My link with Thomson Foundation made me a Mojo trainer and it opened a new avenue for me in journalism. KC Saranga is General Manager, News & Current Affairs, TV Derana in Sri Lanka.
Robin-Lee Francke Since Robin-Lee Francke attended Thomson Foundations Summer Course in 2019, she has worked for both Daily Voice newspaper and Africa News Agency as a content producer in South Africa. She has a strong desire to make a difference in society and now works for IOL, also known as independent Online.
The summer course opened up a whole world of journalism and opportunity to me and I never knew existed. Robin-Lee is a multimedia journalist with IOL in South Africa.
Shoaib Sharifi Afghan Filmmaker, Shoaib Sharifi joined the Thomson Foundation summer training course in 2002. Now Afghanistan Country Director for BBC Media Action, he received the Bafta for the Best Single Documentary, My Childhood, My Country, 20 years in Afghanistan.
We need to tell local journalists how good they are to trust them. They really are good. Shoaib Sharifi is currently Afghanistan Country Director for BBC Media Action.
Kai Hui Wong Kai Hui Wong won our Young Journalist Award in 2021. Born in Malaysia, she now works as a freelance journalist in Taiwan. In her winning entries she relied on data journalism and monitoring to alert people about the impact of any encroaching development, potential environmental damage and possible abuses of power.
There are so many constraints and challenges locally and also globally. I still hope that we can always continue our missions to observe and document with good profession and courage Kai Hui Wong is a freelance journalist and editor
Lekan Otufodunrin The training that Lekan Otufodunrin received from the Thomson Foundation in Cardiff in 1998 made such an impact that his recently published book is titled Dateline Cardiff. Lekan runs a media mentoring and coaching organisation in Nigeria and traces his success as a trainer back to his three months in Cardiff.
There was no structured training for journalists and media organisations in Nigeria. We learnt that kind of training at Thomson Foundation, that is what I do now. Lekan Otufodunrin is the Executive Director of Media Career Development Network.
Mossaber Hossain Mosabber Hossain received South Asian Inquirer Investigative Journalism Award in 2014 from the Thomson Foundation, for his investigation into alleged financial corruption in the telecom sector in Bangladesh. He joined us in London for a weeks training course as part of his prize.
He currently works at Daily Prothom Alo, a popular newspaper and online portal in Bangladesh.
In 2014, I received the Investigative Inquirer Journalism Award. The award was a life-changing event to me. It has developed my leadership and networking capacity. Mosabber Hossain is an investigative journalist with Daily Prothom Alo in Bangladesh.
Gisella Rojas Gisella Alejandra Rojas Rodriguez won our 2018 mobile journalism competition. Her film, about the migrant bus following people fleeing violence in Honduras and travelling through Mexico in search of a new life in the United States, was the first she had made using a smartphone. She is a journalist based in Ecuador and currently works as a digital journalist for Ecuavisa Noticias.
I got the chance to build a network of journalists because I joined the summer course in London. Thomson Foundation has made a huge impact in my career. Gisella Rojas Rodriguez is a digital journalist with Ecuavisa Noticias
Hear more from our alumni about their journey with the Thomson Foundation.
-- Play
-- --
Celebrating 60 years Sixty years after it was founded, Thomson Foundation - now joined by the Berlin based Thomson Media, continues to innovate. Our blended approach to life-long learning supports and inspires journalists and media organisations worldwide because - journalism matters.
Explore our projects across the globe
More from Thomson
18/09/2023
Madhav Chinnappa, the former Director of News Ecosystem Development at Google an...
14/09/2023
Thomson works with journalists in some of the toughest places in the world. Their work and livelihoods are frequently under threat. Thomson Foundation believes ...
05/09/2023
A pioneering system aimed at preventing the spread of disinformation and creating verifiable content from capture to publication is being road tested in a serie...
15/08/2023
To mark the Thomson Foundation's 60th year of nurturing and training journalists globally, we matched six talented young journalists with six of the best in...
07/08/2023
In the autumn of 2022, I was introduced to a young Afghan journalist in London. Zahra Joya had fled Kabul a year before as the Taliban swept through the city. A...
27/07/2023
Pursuing independent journalism is more important than ever. Right now, we are not just facing one or two crises. The crises that journalists are facing are not...
05/07/2023
KC Saranga has trained more than 1,000 journalists, students and people in marginalised communities in Sri Lanka on how to tell stories using their mobile phone...
04/07/2023
A total of 267 applications from 7 countries, representing 125 media outlets and featuring a diverse group of authors (both individuals and groups), have been s...
03/07/2023
Since 2013 our Young Journalist Award has celebrated the outstanding young talent in the media profession. The award is an opportunity for those brilliant young...
28/06/2023
A new project is underway in the Western Balkans to transform digital storytelling and engage public audiences with creative and culture-related content.
Aroun...
19/06/2023
Staying informed about everyday life and events in Ukraine is crucially important for the refugees who have fled the war.
By April 2023, 1.06 million Ukrai...
14/06/2023
Equipped with new investigative journalism skills and financial support after recently completing a training programme, 15 Rwandan journalists are empowered to ...
22/05/2023
The Thomson Foundation is proud to unveil a pioneering free, online training course designed to help newsrooms address a defining issue of the modern age: the e...
12/05/2023
Sixty years after it was founded Thomson Foundation - now joined by the Berlin based Thomson Media, continues to innovate. Its blended approach to life-long lea...
09/05/2023
Journalists from Western Balkans countries and T rkiye are invited to submit their investigative stories for the EU Award for Investigative Journalism 2023.
On...
06/05/2023
The onslaught of false news against real news is unprecedented. In the Middle East, an alarming trend of people doubting published news is overwhelming, Mohamm...
04/05/2023
This article is written by Vitalie Cojocari, a journalist and broadcaster with Euronews in Romania. He is a mentor for the Thomson Media project EU support for ...
26/04/2023
Three months after Thomson Foundation offered six young journalists a once-in-a-lifetime chance', its world-class mentoring programme Connect 6' is re...
25/04/2023
Despite reports to the contrary, radio isn't dead. In fact, not only has it been revived but its combined with its close cousins, the podcast and the long r...
25/03/2023
To increase women's participation; these four words, written down in four seconds, in a proposal can take months, if not years to achieve.
Especially, wh...
24/03/2023
When I started out as an investigative journalist, there were few practising journalists in Kenya to learn from or manuals that I could read to sharpen my skill...
23/03/2023
Journalists in the Western Balkans have been given access to free resources and training in their own languages thanks to a unique platform launched by Thomson ...
22/03/2023
One million refugees have been welcomed into Germany since the Russian invasion who aside from being far from home have lost contact with their community and in...
21/03/2023
Millions of people in Tajikistan have read, watched and listened to an extraordinary social media campaign which has clearly shown the population's hunger f...
08/03/2023
It's August in Pakistan and much of the country is underwater. Catastrophic flooding has killed hundreds, left millions homeless and destroyed infrastructur...
15/02/2023
A strong, fearless and effective media, where talent is recognised and rewarded regardless of gender. That's the goal of She Leads Media: Bettina Fellowshi...
07/02/2023
Our pioneering WhatsApp course is leading the way in training journalists and citizens to spot misinformation and disinformation in Sudan - a country targeted b...
03/02/2023
The finale of the third Valley Voices project saw women journalists and writers gain confidence in writing about some of the more controversial topics facing wo...
23/01/2023
Take six of the brightest young journalists and connect them to six of the best in the industry and you have the recipe for Connect 6', a new, world-class ...
10/01/2023
You're a journalist and news breaks that Pele, arguably the greatest footballer the world has ever known, has died. A colleague in your newsroom is assigned...
14/12/2022
Two former winners of the Vodacom Young Journalist of the Year award in South Africa have finally been treated to their prize of an all-expenses paid trip to Lo...
08/12/2022
Sabin Agha is a Pakistan-based documentary filmmaker, multimedia journalist and a blogger. She has been teaching women journalists at Tribal News Network (TNN)...
29/11/2022
Yashraj Sharma is the interim editor of the online news portal of The Kashmir Walla. He is the winner of the Thomson Foundation's Young Journalist Award 202...
25/11/2022
Yashraj Sharma is the interim editor of the online news portal of The Kashmir Walla. He is a finalist in Thomson Foundation's Young Journalist Award 2022.
...
24/11/2022
Jyoti Yadav is a journalist from New Delhi, working for India's fastest growing news website The Print. She is a finalist in Thomson Foundation's Young ...
23/11/2022
Carlos Ra l Kestler is a 23-year-old journalist from Guatemala. He is a finalist in Thomson Foundation's Young Journalist Award 2022.
Every time a tyre t...
21/11/2022
One year ago, I woke up and was surprised to find out the great news that I was selected as the winner of Thomson Foundations Young Journalist Award 2021. This ...
07/11/2022
Ewen Macaskill introduces the second in his series of news writing courses for the Thomson Foundation - Advanced Writing: The art of storytelling
Storytelling...
04/11/2022
During a time of war, it's essential that journalists are prepared for any eventuality, however unlikely.
With that in mind, Thomson Foundation has respon...
20/10/2022
It has been tough three weeks for the panel of judges at the UK Foreign Press Association (FPA) who had the unenviable task of selecting three finalists for the...
19/10/2022
Three landmark environmental training courses devised by the Thomson Foundation have been translated into Arabic as part of a major push to guide and inform loc...
28/09/2022
A remarkable number of entries arrived from all over the world for this years Young Journalist Award - Cameroon to Colombia, Ukraine to Uganda and Egypt to Ecua...
12/09/2022
This article is written by Hudaibia Iftikhar, a blogger working in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province of Pakistan. Despite being highly educated, she holds a ...
23/08/2022
Running a media organisation in the Western Balkans (WB) is far from easy. A region beset by instability, corruption with challenges to media freedom which prov...
08/08/2022
A digital learning course on mis and disinformation delivered via the messaging platform WhatsApp has gone viral in Sudan.
The first seven days after publicat...
28/07/2022
Dina or evi is a journalist with the Centre for Investigative Journalism of Serbia (CINS). She has won a number of national and international awards for her w...
01/07/2022
Thomson Foundation is celebrating 60 years of promoting excellence in journalism and to mark the occasion, we're offering six rising stars the chance to con...
24/06/2022
Hello, can you hear me? The zoom screen springs to life and the responses quickly follow.
Yes, we can. Good morning . The greetings come from Kenya, Nigeri...
20/06/2022
The crisis in Ukraine has again focused world attention on the plight of refugees and mass migration. It has also challenged journalists to report on the issue ...
10/05/2022
The moment you see your byline next to a story is a magical moment for any journalist. It brings with it a sense of relief, pride and hope that you'll get n...