Barely a month into her six-month fellowship with American news organizations, Kyiv Post staff writer Anna Yakutenko said she’s already gained a lot of useful knowledge.
Yakutenko started her Alfred Friendly Press Partners fellowship in March with training at the University of Missouri School of Journalism in Columbia. On April 6, she started working for KCUR-FM, the flagship National Public Radio station in the Kansas City metropolitan area and a service of the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Later this summer, she will work for the Chicago Tribune.
“At KCUR, I am learning how to improve my audio reporting to make multimedia stories — both short news stories and podcasts,” Yakutenko said. “My mentor is Sylvia Maria Gross, a storytelling editor at KCUR. She makes a wonderful podcast called Midwesternish. She shows me how to write scripts for the podcasts, how to record and edit them faster and better. I will also work on my pronunciation and my voice to be able to host shows. Some of the reporters here are also earning money on their podcasts by selling ads and sponsorship. It’s a great thing for me learn and implement at home, as the Kyiv Post is a commercially driven newspaper in the first place.”
Alfred Friendly (1911-1983) was a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and Washington Post managing editor.
She said that KCUR “is a very busy place, with around 60 staff producing shows, news stories, podcasts, features and working on the social outreach and promoting the radio. It strikes me that the KCUR staff is expanding, while in most of the America media they lay off people. They are a great team to learn from. I also believe that I can give them many useful tips on reporting international affairs, especially eastern Europe.”
She arrived during the spring pledge drive, when the radio station asks listeners for money. “In fact, most of their funding comes from the audience,” Yakutenko said.
‘I am grateful’
During her University of Missouri training, she learned about business journalism, photography, video, investigative reporting, data journalism — “basically everything,” she said.
“I am grateful to the program and to all the donors who supported the Kyiv Post and made this trip possible,” Yakutenko said. “Missouri School of Journalism is the perfect place to learn the latest trends in journalism from the professionals. It’s a very different experience from what I had in my journalism school. All the students were taught theory, but weren’t coached to apply these theories in practice. I am also stunned by other fellows, from whom I learn every day. They remind me that all journalists, no matter in which country they work, should support their colleagues and strive for freedom of press worldwide.”
Yakutenko’s 2018 Alfred Friendly Press Partners group consists of 13 fellows, including six from Macedonia and others from India, Jordan, Sudan and Mexico.
She will return to the Kyiv Post in September.
5th from Kyiv Post
Yakutenko is the fifth Kyiv Post staff writer in the program. The previous four are: Anastasia Forina (2014), Oksana Grytsenko (2015), Olena Goncharova (2016) and Yuliana Romanyshyn (2017).
The Kyiv Post raised nearly $16,000 of the $25,000 in costs for Yakutenko’s participation.
The fundraising campaign got a big boost with a $10,000 donation by Ukrainian entrepreneur and philanthropist Vasyl Khmelnytsky’s K. Fund. The Kyiv Post also raised and transferred $5,810 through a GoFundMe campaign with 24 contributors. The money is still trickling in — with a $150 donation received recently. All donations will be transferred to the program.
Ukrainian entrepreneur and philanthropist Vasyl Khmelnytsky gave $10,000 to Anna Yakutenko’s fellowship. (Volodymyr Petrov)
Randall Smith, executive director of the Alfred Friendly Press Partners program, thanked the donors to Yakutenko’s fellowship.
“Because of contributions like yours, we are able to continue our mission — to create a transformative experience for up-and-coming journalists from the U.S. and countries striving for a free and accurate press,” Smith wrote in an April 12 letter.
“Since 1984, the Alfred Friendly Press Partners program has made its mark on the lives of journalists from the U.S. and other countries and on the lives of their mentors, editors, colleague journalists and communities they meet during six months in the U. S. After three decades of program efforts, we have trained 316 fellows from all continents and 81 countries and been hosted by five dozen U.S. newsrooms. These alumni have had a profund impact on their host media organization and the news operations to which they return.”
Yakutenko’s work
The program was started by Alfred Friendly (1911–1983), a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist and Washington Post managing editor from 1955–1965.
Yakutenko graduated from Kyiv’s Institute of Journalism of Kyiv National Taras Shevchenko University, came to the Kyiv Post as an intern in 2014. Within a year, she was a website editor and then became a lifestyle reporter in 2016.
She was one of the leading journalists in the Kyiv Post Journalism of Tolerance project that highlights challenges faced by sexual, ethnic and other minorities in Ukraine, as well as people with disabilities and those living in poverty. She also produced audio podcasts that featured interviews with staff writers and editors of the Kyiv Post. Additionally, she made a series of video interviews with successful young Ukrainians within the Kyiv Post’s Top 30 Under 30 awards in 2017, part of the annual Kyiv Post Tiger Conference, generally held on the first Tuesday in December.
