Rimantė Pauliukaitytė, a regular contributor for Punskas.pl, an online news portal for the Lithuanian community in Poland’s Punsk district, carried out a NewsSpectrum Professional Placement Fellowship at Lithuanian National Radio and Television (LRT). During her fellowship Rimantė worked with two different RTL departments: RT Radio News Service and LRT Lituanica, the LRT internet platform dedicated to the Lithuanian diaspora.
Besides developing journalist skills and improving her reporting , Rimantė used this opportunity to learn more about everyday operations and newsroom management at LRT. Rimantė says that one of the main benefits of the fellowship was developing strong professional cooperation between the two media outlets and building a stronger relationship between the Lithuanian community in Punsk and LRT’s Lituanica programme.
During her fellowship, Rimantė wrote stories on a variety of topics, from the school system and educational opportunities for the Lithuanian national minority, to the reconstruction of Prussian-Yotvingian settlements along Lithuanian-Polish border, and other topics of importance for the Lithuanian community and cultural heritage.
Photo essay: Reconstruction of a Prussian and Yotvingian settlement in the Puńsk region (Photos by Rimantė Pauliukaitytė)
As LRT Lituanica serves a much wider audience in the diaspora – not only in the neighboring countries – Rimantė’s stories also reached Lithuanian communities far form Poland. Cooperation and content exchange between the two media outlets is expected to continue in future.