After much hard work we are proud to announce the public launch of the yarraReporter website!

The launch will be celebrated at a ceremony in Fitzroy on Friday July 3rd attended by the City of Yarra mayor, Cr Amanda Stone, Infoxchange Australia's Executive Director, Andrew Mahar, and other dignatories and guests.

Today we completed the recruitment of the second batch of the yarraReporter training participants. 

After going through recruitment and selection process, we have 7 recruited participants from 3 housing estates.  More participants are being sought.

Like the first batch participants are from different cultural backgrounds and experiences.  Wol Wol studies journalism at Monash University and Dismas Christopher studies theatre at Victoria College of Art.

The training for second batch will commence in July.

yarraReporters are invited to join lectures on feature writing at Swinburne University’s journalism class this month.  The class is held once a week for the next 3 months.

Four of them participated in the class, and 2 of them finished the assignments. 

The articles will be published not only at yarraReporter but also at uTime, university magazine that is distributed nationally.

Swinburne University’s media and communications unit students will contribute articles to yarraReporter. 

yarraReporter participants completed their first assignment during the latest Atherton Gardens Residents Association election last week. 

Participants were assigned to observe the election and focus on issues such as voter turn-out, security, fraud/manipulation, voters and logistics. 

It was held at Atherton Gardens, Fitzroy, Vic on Oct 30. It was good learning experience for participants, as they come from different country of origins that have different electoral systems.

Today yarraReporter training started. There are 10 participants who come from different country of origins whose different experiences and levels of skills, yet they are united by a motivation to become good journalists.

Gilius Kagoya is one of them.  He is originally from West Papua and came to Australia as an asylum seeker in a canoe with other 42 people from his country in Jan 2006.  He joins the training because he wants to report of human rights violations that are committed by Indonesian military officers to West Papuans. 

We interviewed 13 residents of housing estates in Richmond, Collingwood and Atherton Gardens; 10 of them are able to commit to the training.

The participants applied to be part of the training after reading ads that were distributed and put on the noticeboard in the 3 housing estates and through networking with colleagues who work for community agencies in the estates .  We also advertised the training via radio both at 3ZZZ and 3CR.