News Release

Andrews McMeel Universal Foundation Expands Training Help for Foreign Journalists

Washington, D.C.  (08/22/2007)  For several years, the Andrews McMeel Universal (AMU) Foundation has worked with the Alfred Friendly Press Fellowships (AFPF) to help underwrite the training of professional print journalists from developing countries. This year the foundation is expanding that involvement with a $1,500 grant to help send a Kansas City Star journalist provide training in East African newsrooms.

For the last six months, Mugumo Munene, a reporter with the Daily Nation newspaper in Nairobi, Kenya, has been at the Star, building his skills in interviewing, narrative writing, editorial and commentary writing and computer research. His mentors are Star columnist Rhonda Lokeman and Deputy Managing Editor Randall Smith, also an AFPF Advisory Committee Member.

As Munene returns to his newspaper job in Nairobi this September, Lokeman will travel to East Africa to work with journalists at the Nation Media Group bureaus and help train current and future journalists in places such as Nairobi, Eldoret, Kenya and Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. The AMU Foundation’s contribution helps make this exchange possible. The trip was inspired by Smith's similar visit last year.

Throughout the past 23 years, the Alfred Friendly Press Fellowships has trained 248 journalists from 77 countries around the world. Fellows come to the United States from countries with little or no press freedom and work as reporters in sponsoring newsrooms. Hosts, in addition to The Kansas City Star, include the Philadelphia Inquirer, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Rocky Mountain News, San Francisco Chronicle, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Washington Post.

"This is absolutely the most wonderful opportunity for U.S. journalists and world journalists to discover that all news today is global; whether its news happening in our back yard or in the back yards of those living in Nairobi, we all feel the repercussions. The belief in freedom of the press and this sharing of ideas is the perfect objective for an AMU Foundation funding recipient," says John McMeel, AMU cofounder and AMU Foundation board member. McMeel is a former chairman of the International Press Institute American Committee.

The Friendly Fellows participate in a six-month intensive introduction to the American print media. After completion, the Fellows return to their home countries and apply the principles and skills they learned from theAFPF to their country’s own media system. The 2007 Fellows come from Bangladesh, Brazil, China, Egypt, Georgia, Iran, Kenya and Rwanda. (For more on the Fellows and their program, please visit www.pressfellowships.org.)

Susan M. Albrecht, executive director of the AFPF, noted that John McMeel and the AMU Foundation established a fund four years ago that supports a week of structured training for the Alfred Friendly Fellows at the prestigious Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla. The week, which focuses on the values and techniques of a free press, is a vital complement to the Fellows' hands-on training during their six months in American newsrooms.

Alfred Friendly, a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist and former managing editor of the Washington Post, envisioned a fellowship program that made fair and accurate reporting a worldwide movement. Friendly believed in overcoming cultural and political differences to achieve common progress and a free flow of information.

AFPF accepts no government funding and relies on private donations. This year, generous contributors include the Andrews McMeel Universal Foundation, the Daniel Pearl Foundation, the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation, the Kansas City Star, McClatchy Newspapers, the Open Society Institute, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Poynter Institute, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the Washington Post.

Jonathan Friendly, chairman of the board of the Alfred Friendly Foundation, which provides the bulk of the support for the fellowships, said the gift from the AMU foundation was timely and exciting: “We are trying to open up new avenues of American newsroom’s involvement in promoting press freedom abroad. This gift is a signal that others in American journalism share our vision of building freedom by giving reporters and editors in the developing world the tools they need to advance free speech, an indispensable pillar of democracy.”

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Contact(s): Kathie Kerr

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