Prague Centre for Media Skills was launched by a an international group of media professionals in March 2016. Our purpose is to empower our colleagues in countries transitioning to democracy by enabling dialogue across borders and disciplines, across languages and lines of conflict. Since our inception, we have been dedicated to promoting professional media skills, ethics and standards, and to fostering critical thinking among journalists and communicators in Central and Eastern Europe.

After taking retirement from RFE/RL, I was asked to take part in some training sessions with Russian undergraduate students of journalism here. The upshot of this was that I joined a group of former colleagues from RFE/RL and BBC, plus some Czech journalists, to set up a citizens' initiative called PIMTA - Prague Independent Media Trainers Association. The purpose is to develop training projects for young media professionals in the former Soviet Union. Since we started in October 2011 we ran around a dozen seminars and training events in .Prague, Sukhum(i), Poti, Minsk and even Rimini. In the autumn of 2014 we invited editors from Crimea to Prague for an editors's workshop, just before that kind of activity became impossible. We also provided on-site training for the news department of Abkhazia Television.

I returned to RFE/RL to work with the company's affiliated radio stations in the former USSR. After a few years I switched to program evaluation, reviewing a sample of the output of all RFE/RL's language services ranging from Dari to Bosnian as part of the annual appraisal procedure.

From broadcasting from outside the USSR/Russian Federation, I switched to working with broadcasters inside the country. First I was hired by BBC World Service Training to help set up a tv/radio journalism school in Ekaterinburg. Then I worked for BBC MPM, a Moscow-based public service programming production hiouse, looking for partner radio stations in the regions, travelling Russia from West to East and North to South.Besides organising seminars in Russian cities, e.g. Internet and radio for Siberia, Reporting conflict for the North Caucasus, I was involved in training programs in Georgia, Uzbekistan and Romania.

Assistant DirectorThe best vantage point possible to watch the collapse of communism, the fall of Gorbachev, the rise of Yeltsin, and the emergence of Russian democracy in its early, heroic phase.Exhilarating, but exhausting.

Started as a Producer, worked my up through Senior Producer, Programme Organiser to Assistant Head of Service.This was an extraordinarily interesting time to be involved in broadcasting to the USSR, beginning with Brezhnev's glacial freeze and ending with Gorbachev's frenzied efforts to reform the unreformable.