Rhitu Chatterjee grew up in India and trained as a journalist in the USA where she worked for ten years for media outlets including NPR and Public Radio International (PRI). She now lives in New Delhi, and she continues to report for PRI’s programme The World, as well as for Science magazine.

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Sophia Chinyezi works as a radio journalist and news reader at Radio Maisha in Nairobi. The station broadcasts across Kenya in Kiswahili and is owned by the Standard Media Group. Sophia has been working at Radio Maisha for three years and holds a diploma in broadcast journalism.

The 26-year-old reporter says writing and journalism is in the family. She was inspired to pursue a career in journalism and broadcasting by her grandfather who was a well-known poet and newspaper editor, and by her aunt, Saumu Mwasimba, who currently works in Deutsche Welle’s Kiswahili service. A recent highlight for Sophia was traveling to South Korea to produce a feature comparing South Korean and Kenyan economic development. Sophia spoke to onMedia about her work.

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Environmental journalist Gary Scott Hatigeva lives in the Solomon Islands, a remote tropical country in the South Pacific about 2,000 km north-east of Australia. Much of the population of the Solomons lives in rural villages dispersed over hundreds of islands and many people still have little access to the media. For the past four years, Gary has worked as a reporter, photographer, online editor and graphic designer for The Island Sun, one of the two major newspapers in the Solomon Islands. During his day to day work, Gary is involved with the paper’s editing team, and on occasion stands in as assistant editor. He also takes photographs for the paper and edits them for publications. Gary wrote to onMedia about his work and journalism interests.

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Oudom Tat, 25, is a photojournalist with Voice of Democracy (VOD), one of the few independent media outlets in Cambodia. He was first introduced to the news business at the age of 13 when he started working as a paperboy to help support his family. The Phnom Penh native then went on to teach English and eventually became a project assistant at the Cambodian Center for Independent Media. It was there he discovered his true calling.

Oudom also produces radio stories and video pieces, and his film about the shooting of three workers in the Cambodian garment sector was selected as a finalist entry at the 2013 German Development Media Awards. These days though, Oudom is mainly doing what he loves best, taking pictures of news events around Cambodia, which he hopes will help bring about democratic change in the country. He spoke to onMedia about his work.

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Titilayo Kumilonje Dzabala is an online journalist for the Malawi Broadcasting Corporation (MBC), the country’s state broadcaster. She studied English literature and philosophy at university in Malawi’s commercial capital, Blantyre, where she grew up and still works. The twenty-six year old didn’t plan on becoming a journalist. But now she’s been in the job for more than four years, she loves it – mainly because of the chance it gives her to tell people’s stories. Tech-crazy, Titilayo dreams of one day producing more multi-media content and spending more time blogging about the stories that matter to her. Titilayo talked to onMedia’s Kate Hairsine about the excitement of constantly learning, why she loves editing and how shooting video can drive her crazy.

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Pramila Modachur Krishnan is a senior reporter at the Deccan Chronicle, an English-language daily in Chennai, the capital of India’s Tamil Nadu state. Pramila’s parents are both farmers, and she was the first in her family to get a university education; she has both a bachelor’s and master’s degree. Now 27, she’s especially interested in reporting about the environment and issues facing women and children. In 2013, she took part in a DW Akademie workshop on environmental reporting in Chennai. Her pluck, resourcefulness and dedication convinced her trainers to recommend she attend the recent UN climate conference in Warsaw. onMedia asked her a few questions about her chosen career.

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Bhrikuti Rai is a journalist at the English-language Nepali Times, a weekly publication based in Kathmandu. The 25-year-old completed an undergraduate course in Media Studies at Kathmandu University, but says her real education began when she started working, learning from fellow journalists in the field and in the newsroom.

While she covers politics and business, for the past several years she’s expanded her beat to include the environment — an issue of critical importance for mountainous Nepal, which is highly vulnerable to the effects of climate change. Bhrikuti recently participated in a regional workshop on environmental reporting in Chennai, India, and was selected to attend the UN Climate Change Conference in Warsaw in November 2013.

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Ilma Siriga lives in Papua New Guinea (PNG), a remote tropical country in the South Pacific. She works as a program producer, presenter and reporter for PNG’s national television service, Kundu 2 TV. A fairly new television station, Kundu 2 TV only started up in 2008 and it still doesn’t reach all of PNG’s population, many of whom live in isolated villages in highland valleys.

Ilma has worked at the station for more than three years now. When her team is short-staffed, she not only reports stories but also does the filming and basic editing herself.

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Tenzin Rabgye is a television reporter and news anchor in the tiny mountainous kingdom of Bhutan, which is tucked into the Himalayas between India and China. The 25-year old journalist works for the country’s public broadcaster, Bhutan Broadcasting Service (BBS). Television and the Internet weren’t legalized until 1999 in Bhutan, making it one of the last country’s in the world to do so. Before that, the only media in the country were a state-owned newspaper and BBS radio. Despite this, social media has rapidly grown and now plays a major role in Tenzin’s daily work – In fact, he responded to my Facebook request for an interview within a minute of me messaging to him.

Tenzin works in English and Dzonghka, the main language of Bhutan. He also speaks several dialects as well as Nepali – useful skills when reporting from Bhutan’s numerous remote areas.

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In the next of our Journalists@Work series, we meet Mongezi Chief Zulu, a print journalist in the tiny kingdom of Swaziland in southern Africa. Under the byline Phathizwe-Chief Zulu, he writes developmental, political and economic features for the Nation, a monthly political magazine with a reputation for critical reporting. The thirty eight year old also works for AFP as a stringer, having previously worked for AP for several years.

Swaziland, sub-Saharan Africa’s last absolute monarchy, has little independent journalism, rating 155 out of 179 countries on Reporters Without Borders’ Press Freedom Index. Broadcast media are heavily censored and most mainstream newspapers engage in intense self-censorship. Zulu is extremely proud of working for one of the few independent voices in his country.  DW Akademie’s Kate Hairsine spoke to Zulu about his work.

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