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The Panos Institute, Washington, DC, founded in 1986, is an international non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to strengthening the institutions of civil society worldwide by providing local grassroots journalists and NGO information providers with resources to cover major underreported and misreported issues responsibly and in depth.

Panos facilitates the publication of alternative perspectives on these issues and the development of "hands-on" media training materials for its programs. Through its platform as an international organization and its global program, "MediaNet," Panos facilitates regional alliances and cross-border collaboration among journalists and between journalists and NGOs.

For fourteen years, Panos Washington has worked with journalists and their institutions in Central America and the Caribbean to educate and communicate on such development and human rights issues as HIV/AIDS, the perspectives of marginalized peoples, including children, environmentally solid approaches to community problems, and the experiences of women and children in the aftermath of civil conflict. In 1998 Panos Washington began working with independent media institutions in Nigeria to support greater freedom of expression, training in computer-assisted research and reporting, and analysis of how the country's media covers inter-communal, inter-faith and other diversity issues.

The Panos Institute, Washington, DC, has offices in Port-au-Prince, Haiti and is affiliated with, but institutionally independent from, the Panos Institutes of London, Paris, Dakar, Lusaka, Kampala and Katmandu.

About the Center for War, Peace, and the News Media

The Center for War, Peace, and the News Media is a non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to supporting journalists and news organizations in their efforts to sustain informed and engaged citizenries worldwide.

The Center is headquartered at the New York University Department of Journalism and Mass Communication, where it was founded in 1985. The Center's goals are:

• To promote those norms and practices which independent journalism requires to operate effectively in diverse political, social, and technological environments;
• To strengthen those economic, legal, and educational institutions necessary to support fully functioning media sectors in emerging democracies; and
• To explore the role of the media in the dynamics of war, peace, and conflict, and to create media-based initiatives to transform conflict and help manage its consequences.

The Center's activities for 2000-2001 are concentrated in three areas: assisting American and Asian journalists in their coverage of international affairs and global security issues; aiding Russian journalists and news organizations in the process of developing a professional, democratic, and economically sound media sector; and initiating projects and research that explore constructive roles for the media in ethnic, civil, and other intra - and international conflicts. Funding for Center programs comes primarily from private U.S. foundations, with additional support from several governmental and international agencies for work in Europe and Russia.

The Independent Journalism Centre [IJC] of Lagos, Nigeria, is a not-for-profit, freedom of expression organization, founded in 1996 and dedicated to training, research, documentation and advocacy on media affairs. It publishes the Media Monitor, an authoritative weekly online digest of events in the Nigerian media and the Green Monitor, dedicated to environmental reporting.

IJC also conducts a "French for Journalists" program, training in political and electoral reporting, and a computer assisted research and reporting [CARR] training to enable media practitioner make the transition to the digital workplace.

IJC is the first private media resource institute of its kind in Nigeria and receives support from the Frederich Ebert Foundation, the Alliance Francaise, the Goethe Institute, The Ford Foundation, the Freedom Forum, and the National Endowment on Democracy. It is one of three members of the International Freedom of Expression Exchange (IFEX) sponsored by UNESCO in the English-speaking West Africa sub-region.

Recently, the IJC has received funding from the Office of the Transitional Initiatives [OTI] of the United States Government in its media Telecenters project.

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