REGION: Pacific exchange journalists talk to Southern Cross about NZ visit

AUCKLAND (Pacific Media Watch/Southern Cross): Student journalists Shivika Mala and Linda Filiai from the University of the South Pacific in Fiji spoke to 95bFM's weekly radio programme Southern Cross yesterday about their internship with the Pacific Cooperation Foundation.

Mala and Filiai spoke with host Amanda Robinson about their motivations behind applying for the internship, in which both recognised the opportunity they had been given to take an inside look at New Zealand's media industry.

"If we were to compare New Zealand to the Pacific, we are less fortunate, so we are so eager to take up this opportunity to experience, to learn and to share these experiences with our classmates and journalists in Tonga and the Pacific," Filiai said.

Both also spoke of the challenges they face on a daily basis reporting in the Pacific, including media freedom, censorship and a lack of communication.

• Southern Cross radio programme on Pacific Media Centre's Soundcloud

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3