Teaching Best Practice. Opportunities and Barriers of NGO Supported Journalist Training in a Hybrid Regime like Kyrgyzstan 

Many transitional countries similar to Kyrgyzstan, so-called “young democracies” have never had a free press and now they are trying to develop media implementing the Western models of journalism. As a developing state, Kyrgyzstan still doesn’t have a well-formed school of journalism; it is still operating on the basis of Soviet standards practiced at the faculties of journalism at universities. Since the country got its independence in 1991, international donors, for instance, the OSCE, the European Commission, and the Soros Foundation, poured a lot of money into the country to train journalists, and invited trainers to improve the professional skills of the journalists. Despite the efforts of international organizations one can not say that journalist are fully committed to the professional standards. This research is supposed to clear up the question, why NGO’s attempts in enforcing democratic norms and high standards of journalism have not been successful and what kind of barriers they have faced. 

Alina Kenzheeva completed her studies at the Kyrgyz-Russian Slavic University (KRSU) as a graduate linguist and specialist in theory of foreign languages and cultures in 2007. In October 2017, she got a master degree in media studies at the University of Tübingen. From 2006 to 2014 she was working in Kyrgyzstan at the news agency AKIpress; first as a reporter, then as an editor and finally as a project manager. Being selected to participate in the program «Journalists International» at Freie University of Berlin in 2009, she had an opportunity to complete an internship at the newspaper Der Tagesspiegel. In 2016, she completed internship at the Russian service of Deutsche Welle and in 2017 worked as a freelance journalist at DW.