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On October 1st and 2nd, JICA expert team (NHK International) conducted a local workshop for regional branches of Ukrainian public television, as one of the critical activities in JICA's Capacity Development Project for Public Broadcasting Company (PBC) of Ukraine. The workshop was dedicated to emergency news coverage during covid-19 pandemic.

The event was inaugurated by the welcome speech of JICA Ukraine Resident Representative Mr. Satoshi Sugimoto, who underlined the importance of JICA cooperation with PBC. "It has reported that PBC suspilne media is included in the white list of the top 10 high quality media in Ukraine and it has been doing a good job of providing Ukrainian audience with fair and unbiased information", Mr. Sugimoto said.

PBC chairman Mr. Mykola Chernotytsky appreciated JICA's support to PBC development and expressed hope for the continuation of cooperation after the current project.

During the first part of the workshop, 21 chief editors of PBC regional branches shared their experience of working in a covid-19 pandemic situation. Practically, all the participants agreed that the biggest challenge in covering covid was establishing cooperation with local healthcare authorities and hospitals, as well as getting video footage from the hospitals without putting their crews into harm's way and without distracting hospital workers from their daily duties. Other branches raised the topic of vaccination, in many cases local healthcare authorities asked PBC to help them with raising public awareness about the necessity of vaccination (registration and locations of vaccination, availability of vaccines, etc.), as this is a crucial matter of public health. Some participants talked about their experience of covering everyday people's life during the pandemic. In particular, about a tulip farmer who could not conduct business as usual, so he distributed the flowers among the local hospitals, expressing his gratitude to the doctors in this way. Other editors focused on the technical advantage of covid restriction - all experts and commentators that were hard to get, became much more accessible for interviews through communication platforms such as Zoom.

The second part was mainly dedicated to the development of covid emergency reporting part for PBC manual. According to JICA expert Mr. Atsushi Miyao, the elaborated material will be added to the emergency news handbook that has already been prepared. "This will update our handbook, which will be distributed to the news sections of PBC headquarter and all local stations and will be used for daily coverage activities", Mr. Miyao said. He added that JICA expert team has conducted three workshops so far, but this time, for the first time in two years, there was a more lively exchange of opinions regarding the COVID-19 coverage. "The participants showed their enthusiasm to learn about the situation of coverage in other areas and utilize it for coverage in their own area", Mr. Miyao concluded.

On day two the participants had a chance to use the occasion for sharing their work experience and discuss best practices in local news gathering and reporting.

This project will continue until the end of March, 2022, and the final workshop for emergency broadcasting is scheduled to wrap up the results of cooperation achieved in the project.