Transitions Online is an international publishing and media development organization based in Prague and registered as a Czech non-profit, non-governmental, civic association. Our mission is to improve the professionalism, independence, and impact of the news media in the 29 post-communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and the former Soviet Union.

Training journalists has been a key part of TOL’s mission from the outset. From our early emphasis on online, on-the-job training for young reporters, we have expanded into organizing specialized seminars for the region’s journalists on a variety of themes, such as covering EU integration, war crimes, diversity, reconciliation, and corruption. These seminar topics are often subjects on which commercial media provide little or no training and that they rarely cover. The TOL training institute now also offers web publishing internships on how to launch and sustain online news services, as well as blogging and other new media tutorials. In cooperation with the BBC World Trust and the Guardian Foundation, we have recently launched several distance education projects. To date, TOL has helped improve the writing and reporting skills of hundreds of journalists from the region.