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From Sunday 15 April to Thursday 19 April MDP hosted international media trainer Robb Montgomery in Cairo, organizing an intense schedule of workshops for a variety of participants from state-affiliated, independent, and party media, as well as academic institutions, business consultants and our news agency partner.
The training conducted by Montgomery perfectly reflected the mission and values of MDP: providing effective, exciting and impactful training that brings in the latest in global media thinking. The training was also sustainable, with clear components emphasizing this point.
The highlight of the week of training took place on 17-18 April at the Supreme Press Council, where 22 journalists from at least 11 daily newspapers (one page designer and one features reporter from each newspaper) were enthralled by two days of presentations and hands-on workshop exercises centered on the innovative idea of “page design and layout at the beginning of the journalistic process, rather than the end.”
The participants were all members of the Press Syndicate under 35 years old, the latter factor being key in guaranteeing the effectiveness of the training. They were all enthusiastic about learning this new concept. The way most papers function (not just in Egypt, but everywhere) is that after the story is written and edited, it is given to the page designer to lay out on the page (almost as an afterthought). The crux of Montgomery’s message is that: with the increasing challenges to printed media from TV, the internet and other multi-media technologies, it becomes essential for printed papers to use design techniques that are not only striking and effective to the eye, but that also serve readers’ changing needs in a highly competitive media environment.
Although the schedule was packed with activities, Montgomery managed – on his own initiative – to also add a last-minute presentation/workshop that really drove home this point. With the tragic killings at Virginia Tech dominating news headlines, Montgomery managed to put together a short film that examined the front pages of about forty newspapers from around the world and how they used to design to cover the tragedy. This was a highly effective practical exercise that allowed a real-life look into how papers around the world were dealing with a news cycle that made their job much more difficult than it used to be. It was no longer enough to report on a major event that happened the day before (especially considering that most readers would have already seen it all on TV or the net) – papers now had to find more original and effective ways of telling the story. This presentation naturally led to a discussion/debate about how these young designers and reporters participating in the training would design their front pages about such an incident, if given the chance.
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