WHAT'S NEW

2011 has so far been our busiest year for media training at British universities. We have now trained at 30 universities in England and Wales, and returned to three quarters of them - in one case as many as eight times! They include two of the top six universities in the world, according to this year’s Times survey, University College London and Oxford University. At Oxford, we are collaborating with the Oxford University Computer Services to run a podcasting course, and have also been invited to Southampton University to deliver two podcasting workshops there. Podcasts are fast becoming a shop- window for universities, and we are sure mpi can contribute to making them more watchable and listenable. You can watch mpi video about our Oxford podcasting course here.

Despite the cuts, we have found that our competitively-priced, hands-on training is still very much in demand, and we hope the emphasis on impact and dissemination in the new Research Excellence Framework will keep us busy helping academics and scientists to engage with the public through the media.

In November, we returned to Kyiv Mohyla Academy, Ukraine’s premier independent university, to run, for the fourth year, a course in online news writing for the Digital Future of Journalism programme. This year we trained not only thirty young journalists but also ten teachers from journalism departments at leading Ukrainian universities who will be launching digital journalism courses themselves.

We were delighted that one of the final exercises of our course, coverage of Ukrainian online shopping habits, was posted on the premier Ukrainian news website, Ukrainska Pravda. It was very impressive to see how much the skills of Ukrainian online journalists have shot up in the past four years.

While in Kiev we signed a contract with the British embassy to deliver training next February for stewards, volunteers and civil servants ahead of the Euro 2012 football championships. This is a follow-up to our successful training earlier this year for ministry officials and journalists. The ambassador will hold a press conference to launch a brochure with communications guidelines at the end of the training.

In October, we carried on training European civil society organisations under the Ethical Journalism Initiative run by the London-based Media Diversity Institute for the European Union. The diversity and human rights organisations sent their communications officers to London for the training, and we are following up with online consultation and some site visits.

AMONG OUR CLIENTS

International Donors: The World Bank, the European Commission, the British government (DFID, FCO), USAID, OSCE

International organisations: United Nations (WHO, IAEA, UNDP, UNICEF, ILO), Media Diversity Institute, Council of Europe

Universities (UK): Kent, Brunel, Essex, Winchester, St George's, University of London, Oxford, King's College, University of London, Queen Mary's, University of London, University College London, Exeter, Plymouth, Bradford, Kingston, Glamorgan, Sussex, Bangor, Brighton, Hertfordshire, Warwick, Oxford Brookes, Portsmouth, Birmingham, Loughborough, the London School of Economics,Southampton, Surrey, Nottingham, University of the Arts, London; (Ukraine): Kyiv-Mohyla Academy; (Georgia): The Caucasus School of Journalism

Companies: Ogilvy PR (Brussels), ERTICO (EU), TADS Ltd(UK), Linden Consulting (UK), Ikon-Institute(Germany), STB TV Channel (Ukraine), Media Friendly (UK), SAFEGE (Belgium)