Lessons from Another Mentoring Program

[This post is from AuthorAID team member Bernard Appiah. Many thanks, Bernard, for contributing it! —Barbara]

I attended the 8th World Conference of Science Journalists in Helsinki, Finland, on 24–28 June 2013. About 800 participants from different parts of the world took part in the conference.

I attended a pre-conference workshop titled "How mentoring boosted my career in science journalism". In this workshop, Jan Lublinski—a journalist, trainer, and consultant based in Germany—gave an overview of a recently completed online mentoring program. In addition, a mentee from Kenya and one from Lebanon described how mentoring boosted their careers.

This 18-month online mentoring program, known as the Science Journalism Cooperation (SjCOOP) Project, served participants in Africa and the Middle East.

Features included the following:

• Experienced science journalists (from both advanced and developing countries) mentored less experienced journalists.
• Each mentor was responsible for 4 or 5 mentees.
• Expected outcomes for mentees were clearly stated. These included how many stories to write per month.

Some successes for the program were the following:

• Some mentees have become trainers of other science journalists.
• Some mentees have been promoted to higher positions.
• An external evaluator has found that mentees’ stories have improved.

The evaluator also found that when SjCOOP mentors spent more time helping mentees develop story ideas and gave mentees more feedback before publication, the mentees produced better stories.

Do these observations also apply to the AuthorAID mentoring program?

Kindly share your thoughts.