I have recently done a few consultancy jobs for Press Now a Dutch NGO for media and development in Kurdish-Iraq, Azerbaijan and Moldova.

In Northern-Iraq’s Sulymanya I visited the Awene Group a publisher of one of the few independent newspapers in the country to assist Managing Director Asos Hardi with regards to the company’s Internet strategy concerning their three publications on a road towards sustainability.

In Azerbaijan the Baku School of Journalism needed some advice on revising their project proposal for an on-line training facility for their students and in a week’s time we managed to not only rewrite the proposal but also shed some light on future steps.

My Moldavian counterpart is API an independent NGO that assists media and journalists in the country. API represents a group of independent newspapers and we discussed developing strategies that could help these papers deal with dire conditions in the country and the effects of the word’s credit crunch that had a profound effect on the national media market. A follow-up on this mission is scheduled for next year when some of the suggested strategies will be implemented once the funds have become available.

Apart from working as a  consultant I am writing a project proposal for an sms-based marketplace that could be used by local media in Africa and Asia to generate some income from ‘online ads’. The concept is a combination of existing technologies and a cross-media approach that can involve newspapers and community radio stations in combination with local mobile service providers.