Event reports
At the ceremony, Peter Rimmele, Resident Represantative of the India office of the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, delivered a speech and congratulated the students on their successful completion of the journalism training. He pointed to the special responsibility of journalists in times of "fake news" and quoted Mahatma Gandhi who said "The objective of journalism is service". Journalists are able to polarize or harmonize, encourage or depress societies through the way they are reporting. He expressed his confidence that the young journalists would be able to take the right path because of their training.
Mahfuz Anam, editor-in-chief of the Bangladesh based Daily Star, also emphasized the importance of journalism for a society in his speech. If justice and journalism function at their best, then a society functions at its best, Anam said. He also praised the role of print journalism, which will always be referred to for detailed analysis and views.
The training of young journalists is one of the main working areas of KAS in India. The young journalists are to be trained according to international standards which contribute towards enabling media in India to fulfill even more intensively their socio-political watchdog function and duty to inform.
For this purpose, the KAS with C.R. Irani Foundation, which is affiliated directly to the national newspaper "The Statesman", founded the "The Statesman Print Journalism School" in Kolkata in 2008. The course aims at training the students in basic techniques of journalism as well as general methods of interpretation and analysis of events of political, social and economic dimensions. In August 2018, the eleventh batch will start its training lasting a total of ten months.
