Future University in Egypt (Credit: FUE)

Little bit of personal business to share:

iMediaEthics’ publisher and editor-in-chief Rhonda Roland Shearer recently accepted an invitation to be a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at Future University in Egypt’s Political Mass Media department.

Her appointment begins this month and will include developing and training students, journalists, and sources, including government employees.

Shearer notes media ethics and literacy trainings have always been focused on journalists and the public but not sources. Shearer said, “The duty of any journalist is to develop sources and convince them, for example, the media ethics value of going on the record. To know how to work within press freedoms, requires training and practice to earn trust.”

Shearer’s basic goals include improving journalism in Egypt by training journalists, citizens and the government how to effectively communicate and share information. By strengthening trust and understanding between the media and the government, source and media outlet, Shearer hopes to improve the reporting of accurate information for citizens and a better relationship between the media and the government in Egypt, Shearer tells iMediaEthics.

Next week, Shearer will begin working with the university to create a 12-class curriculum and a textbook on fact checking and media ethics in Egypt. The textbook is tentatively titled “From the Front-Lines of the Media Ethics Battles in Egypt: How Fact Checking Supports Press Freedom and Democracy.”

Shearer has been living in Egypt since June and spent much of the past fifteen years in Cairo. Previously, she was on the board of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina library soon after the 2002 start of the library. She left the board after two terms.

Shearer and her late husband Stephen Jay Gould started the not-for-profit, non-partisan Art Science Research Laboratory in 1998 to promote interdisciplinary studies. ASRL publishes iMediaEthics, as well as Tout-Fait and NASA’s Astrobiology Magazine astrobio.net, among others.

See press release on this here.