Media Unlimited director Magda Abu-Fadil coached two groups of Arab News reporters, editors and producers in the basics of journalism and advanced reporting and editing skills in August 2023.

The first group’s sessions involved exercises to test the participants’ journalistic knowledge, power of observation, capabilities, command of grammar and punctuation rules. It involved writing and editing assignments, creating photo captions, as well of tests of their knowledge of geography, history, economics, politics and culture.

Abu-Fadil also focused on the definition of news and news story structures. The trainees evaluated videos and used them as a basis to write stories while conducting online research to provide context for their assignments.

The advanced workshop’s trainees drilled down on the importance of language, proper grammatical usage, often taken for granted, preparation, the mechanics of editing, with a focus on leads, headlines, graphics and photos, verification and fact-checking, and, ethics.

Abu-Fadil gave the journalists exercises and overnight assignments to assess their comprehension and application of what knowledge they acquired during the training. All sessions were interspersed with exercises.