Robb Montgomery returns to Egypt to work again with the Egypt Media Development Program, a USAID-funded training program operated by IREX and MSI, Inc.
Over two weeks he will be training and consulting with cross-media journalists and senior executives at Egypt’s top media houses.
Montgomery’s specialty is to lead senior managers in goal-oriented workshops where they learn his system for developing new products and ideas for serving new audiences.
Old Cairo: Walk with me as I squirm through the narrow passages of the famous souk at Khan el-Khalili.
In these ancient streets the passages are full of mosques, vendors, deliveries, tourists and shoppers all mixing at the same time. The sounds emerging through all this are of the Friday prayers. I prefer to make my way through the labyrinth during the quiet morning time.
It is summer holiday season and I am sharing a series of mini travelogues to reflect the season.
An Egyptian dive master briefs SCUBA divers moments before they dive in the coral reefs of the Red Sea.
Shazly, an Egyptian SCUBA dive master gives the briefing before my tour of Ras Mohamed National Park.
The site where two bodies of water meet is an undersea paradise off the Sinai coast.
It is summer holiday season and I am sharing a series of mini travelogues to reflect the season.
My colleague, Ahmed Montasser, is providing simultaneous Arabic to
English translation to me in this moment. He is literally whispering
into my ear as I query an editor at the steps of Al Ahram. Egypt's
largest newspaper
Over the past three weeks I have filmed more than eight key interviews in Toronto, Moscow, Cairo and Alexandria for the journalism documentary, "Breaking The News."
Interviews with editors-in-in chief in Moscow and Alexandria, entrepreneurial journalists at a week-old-online startup in Toronto, and today, the chairman of the board of a 15,000 employee media house in the most populated Arabic country in the world.
I am heading back to Egypt to work for three weeks with the Egypt Media Development Program and the schedule they have prepared is jam-packed with training and consulting visits with journalists from Egypt’s top media houses.
Robb is not only a very professional trainer in multimedia subjects he is also a visionary that translates his ideas into money-spinning strategy. On top he is much liked by his students and colleagues for putting things across to them in a patient, yet convincing way. In Egypt he is helping change mind-sets on print-online-mobile migration and the monitization thereof.
Joe Raffelberg
Chief of Party
USAID Media Development Program (MDP)
Cairo, Egypt
MSI/IREX
This collection of accidental, casual and awkward photos reveal a dimension of 80 days of overseas travel that isn’t normally revealed in a journalist’s storytelling.
I am back in Chicago now organizing thousands of still-frame images and hours of documentary video footage and I kept pausing over the unplanned images that were never part of my “official reporting.” Hmm. I kept being drawn to them and decided to see if they could still be useful.
The multimedia below is made almost entirely from poor quality mobile phone images.
Hayam, a photographer for the Middle East News Agency talks about the impact of multimedia training for Egyptian journalists.
Cairo: This week I am producing a new documentary film about the Egypt Media Development Program (A USAID funded initiative) with budding MDP filmmakers Ahmed and Amr. These guys are great. Ahmed and I have made two Arabic-language film documentaries in the last year and we have time to make this new one really high quality.
In the first week we have made a half dozen interviews with journalists that MDP has trained and we filmed on locations all around Cairo. We have visited the offices of the news training centers for journalists the program has established at MENA, Al Ahram Al Akbar, Cairo University and other news organizations. We have done interviews in the streets and at sunrise this morning we filmed some new footage from the Pyramids. We were buzzed by huge military aircraft flying at low altitude. Have to wait for the film to be ingested to see how it came out but here re a few snaps from my trusty LX-2 which has joined me on my adventures the last four years.
Robb Montgomery produces new media workshops to train journalists and media professionals in more than 20 countries in writing for the Web, multimedia reporting, and Web video journalism.
His hands-on seminars include interactive learning techniques, live demonstrations and expertise in teaching new media concepts to professionals.
