Our author and editor of Media Provinces site Irene Velska from Karaganda Center for Regional Journalism led a blogging training in Pavlodar last weekend, February 9-10. Young journalists, journalism students and NGO people were invited to take part in the training. The program included introduction to citizens media, discussions about blogging as modern mass media, data protection and online security. As part of the session on practical aspects of blogging, Irene showed the trainees how to post articles on blog, how to link, add photos and use other functions - on Russian-language neweurasia Kazakhstan blog. Below is the short summary of the posts produced during the training. If you are interested in reading any of these posts in full, let us know by leaving a comment here and we will translate it.

MaZhor posted the photos of a beautiful shrine built for Mashkhur Zhusup Kopeev, 19th century historian, philosopher and poet. Kopeev was born in Bayanaul of Pavlodar region (founded in 1826 by Russian Cossacks), and his great grandson lives in Ekibastuz now. MaZhor has been at the opening of the shrine on 11 November 2006, when more than 10 thousand people from all over Kazakhstan came to the shrine to take 73 steps up the stairs, the number of years that Mashkhur lived.

Naturally, journalism is a topic of interest for new bloggers, young journalists. Tasya reviewed the Ekibastuz press in her post, giving examples of three local newspapers. Entertainment plays a big role in how popular the papers are: they use the services of professional designers, conduct competitions and are rich with advertisements.

Velena portrayed typical journalist from Pavlodar region: it’s a 37-year old female, ethnic Russian, not married, without special journalism education, with 8 years work experience and a monthly salary of 35 thousand tenge (about 280 USD). To create this portrait, several third year journalism students of the Pavlodar State University conducted the survey among the journalists of six regional newspapers. They think that in the future this portrait might change - the average journalist would be younger (due to the opening of a new journalism department in the University), though Russian would still dominate the media.

In another post, Velena wrote that free Internet is offered for the students of the Pavlodar State University. In addition, the students are invited to take part in developing one of the University’s websites. To use free Internet, however, students have to go through quite a cubersome procedure: they have to speak to the department’s supervisor, who has to write a memo to the deputy head of the University. After getting permission, the students should go to the IT administrator, who creates individual logins and passwords on the University’s server. This allows the students to use the Internet from 6 to 30 hours. All sites visited by the students are registered.

Finally, Samson wrote an essay about modern youth, whose patriotism and initiative he thinks to be a safeguard of stability in Kazakhstan. His own program as of a patriot of the country would be to learn Kazakh in 5 years, to continue volunteering, to produce a historial film, to try increase the transparency of the state bodies, to travel around Kazakhstan and get acquainted with the original culture of each place, to learn about all religions of Kazakhstan and to work for the well-being of his home city Pavlodar.