Meet and Greet

Here's our first meeting with the heads of Television Maldives (TVM) and Voice of Maldives (VOM), the radio station that prefers to be known by its acronym in the Maldivian language of Dhiveli, DRA. Radio has more experienced journalists and feels less pressure to improve, but its feisty chief, Badru Naseer, definitely wants to participate. More on the other main players later.

All managers were open and receptive to the need for "branding" their product to attract an audience and compete with private broadcasters who will soon start news programming. TVM chief Ali Khalid says the public perceives his station as "government propaganda" read by inexperienced young journalists. That perception is pretty close to reality and they welcome the opportunity to change. They soon will transition from being government-controlled stations to a public broadcasting model much like our PBS or NPR.

What these people are doing is extraordinary and courageous. Only a few years ago, the regime considered journalism a crime. In the 2001 book "Cultures of the World: Maldives" author Marshall Cavendish wrote: "Any publication that criticizes the government is immediately banned and its editors and writers banished or jailed." Part of our job here is to empower the Maldives' first generation of broadcast journalists to operate under some guarantee of press freedom.