Provincial reporter of Tamil weekly receives Kadirgamar scholarship

Mr. Krishnaprasath Krishnamoorthy of Suryakanthi, a weekly Tamil language newspaper published by Express Newspapers (Ceylon) Ltd., left last week for advanced training at the prestigious Mass Communication School (MASCOM) in Kottayam, India as the fifth Lakshman Kadirgamar Journalism scholar. The scholarship is offered to the Lakshman Kadirgamar Foundation by the Malayala Manorama Group of Newspapers in memory of the one-time Sri Lankan Foreign Minister. Malayala Manorama is one of India’s largest selling newspaper houses and manages MASCOM. Sahai, Director, International Centre, Goa and Ms. Iskra Panevska, Communications Head for UNESCO, New Delhi.

The working sessions will include discussions on Codes of Ethics, Cyber News, the Right to Information Law, and regulatory frameworks in several countries. Sri Lanka has the only self-regulatory mechanism for the newspaper industry in South Asia. These sessions will be held at the auditorium of the Sri Lanka Press Institute and will be streamed live to viewers around the world on: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/pccsl--10-years. There will be simultaneous translations into Sinhala and Tamil

The PCCSL, the newspa-

Mr. Krishnamoorthy earned a merit certificate in the Denzil Peiris Young Reporter of the Year category at last year’s Journalism Awards for Excellence programme conducted jointly by The Editors’ Guild of Sri Lanka and the Sri Lanka Press Institute.

He will be under the tutelage of the distinguished Professor Thomas Oommen, who has trained a generation of Indian journalists, first at the Asian College of Journalism in Chennai and now at MASCOM.

Mr. Krishnamoorthy is a resident of Hatton and the first provincial correspondent to receive this scholarship. per industry’s self-regulatory ‘policeman’ was established in October 2003 with a Board of Directors comprising representatives of the Newspaper Society of Sri Lanka, The Editors’ Guild of Sri Lanka, the Free Media Movement and the Sri Lanka Working Journalists’ Association with the support of several other media associations.

An autonomous Dispute Resolution Council headed by former Secretary General of Parliament and onetime Ombudsman Sam Wijesinha works on the basis of conciliation, mediation and arbitration under the Arbitration Act No. 11 of 1995 and has settled more than a thousand reader complaints over the years.