DILI, 01 april 2022 (TATOLI) – The Secretary of State for Youth and Sports (SEJD) together with Timorese journalists discussed further steps that need to be done to boost the coverage of various types of sports events and the youths.
During the meeting, the State Secretary for Youth and Sports, Abrão Saldanha stressed that journalists and media need to focus their coverage on the high performance of the athletes.
“First of all, journalists play a crucial role in turning a type of sport into an integral component of our culture. Thus, we need to keep promoting this kind of sport to achieve our target and goal to be able to compete at the regional and international level,” Saldanha made the comments during the meeting held at SEJD, on friday.
He said it’s important to promote sport at the grassroots level: “We need to promote any sports competition at the community level to engage as many as young people. The media need to keep promoting the sport to become part of our culture. Once a type of sport becomes our culture then we need to invest to boost our performance.”
Saldanha emphasized that it is important for a journalist to know the sports system to be able to have better coverage of the sports events, adding, therefore, SEJD would organize a workshop with journalists to improve and enrich journalists’ knowledge of the sports system, etc.
“Sport is made up of three essential components, namely physical literacy, physical activity, and games: “We shouldn’t exclude one of these three components when talking about sports.”
Saldanha pledged to provide sport-related documents in the future to help journalists in wiring colorful sports stories, saying colorful stories would engage more readers.
Echoing Saldanha’s statement, Rafael Belo, a journalist and news editor at Timor-Leste News Agency ‘TATOLI’ said SEJD needed to provide those related-sport documents to serve the people’s right to true and authentic information with the provision of important data: “Document is essential to verify any statement made by political leaders, government members and so on.”
“For instance, the public has the right to know the impact of the implementation of a sports program when talking about the percentage of the execution of the State budget allocated to the program by a public institution. Such as, how many young people have benefited from the implementation of a community sports program,” he said.
In addition, Arminda de Carvalho, a journalist from Timor-Leste’s Sate own TV (RTTL) also said that SEJD needed to make it easy for journalists to have access to any sport-related information that the public needed to know.
“It’s important to update any sport-related information to the public. Thus, SEJD needs to make it easy for us to access that kind of information that the public have the right to know,” she said.
The meeting between SEJD and Timorese journalists would be held every three months at the SEJD.
Journalist: Filomeno Martins
Editor: Rafy Belo
