Final Evaluation Report

Sofia Lopez, MEGA TV, Chile

To start this report I want to thank One World Broadcasting Trust for giving me the opportunity of being part of this amazing fellowship.  
In this report I would love to talk about every experience we had in this fellowship, but I’m going to write about the biggest experiences I had.

The great experience for me during these two weeks was being part of a very special group of people, coming from the most varied countries of the world, representing different cultures.  This has been very special for me because I come from the southern part of the world, where we don’t usually get to know people from places like Africa.  In these weeks we not only became fellows, we shared our time together and became friends.  We have learned a lot from each other and how the media is being developed in each of our countries.

During my career in television I have worked most of the time in the entertainment area and always followed the managing direction.  Even though I am not a journalist, one of the most important things I’ve learned from the British media is the relevance of informing and teaching people through news and current affairs programs.  This will be one of my big tasks in my channel, trying to improve this area and giving more time and importance to international news.  On the other hand, I would like the British channels to show more about Chile and South America, because it is a very unknown territory for you and has very poor coverage, this may be because we are very far away and they focus on the Middle East and Africa.

 
From all the places we visited the one that impressed me most was Al Jazeera English. Not knowing much of them before made me have a wrong idea of what they did.  It is amazing what they are doing around the world, the technology they are using and how they are investing in their bureaus out of the UK just to get news right by having people living in different countries and not sending correspondents that won’t know the background of the country they are reporting on. It is the only place I’ve ever been that are not reducing costs, instead they are investing more.

I also was very impressed with how proud everyone is of working in their channels. This happened in the BBC, Sky, Channel 4, Aljazeera, etc, thinking they are the best in this sector. Another thing I realized is the bad image the BBC has in the other channels – they don’t like it at all.

From our meetings in Ofcom and the Department of Culture, Media and Sports I got very important information for my organization about the migration to digital television, which is going to be very useful.

The most useful information for my actual position is what I learned about the commissioning process of Channel 4 and also how the BBC applies its editorial policies to independent producers.

We were very lucky to have the opportunity of participating in a session in the Parliament for our general knowledge and get to know how traditional can a ceremony in the House of Lords be.  Lord Young was extremely kind with us, showing us the entire place and giving us a very interesting history class.

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