M-TAG Quarterly Report January 1, 2019 – March 31, 2019

IREX implements the program with local partner organizations Ethics Charter, and management consulting group Innova. The program's goals will be achieved by a set of coordinated activities in support of three objectives: Program Objective 1, Program Objective 2, and Program Objective 3. Program Objective 1 focuses on journalists demonstrating accurate and ethical reporting on public interest issues, including progress towards key government reforms. Program Objective 2 aims to have regional media outlets demonstrate improved financial viability and transparency. Program Objective 3 seeks to increase access to balanced and relevant information in the occupied territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. In the reporting quarter, M-TAG's eight media partners received training and consulting in content production on-site from M-TAG staff members and free-lance trainers. IREX sorted out the equipment it procured for M-TAG's 11 media partners in the US and in Georgia. Batumelebi, Kutaisi Post, and Guria News received the equipment in March, while the remaining partners will receive the equipment and associated training in April and May. Radio NOR, Radio Marneuli, JNews, Radio Way, TV Borjomi, Channel 9, Kutaisi Post, Batumelebi, SK News, livepress.ge, qartli.ge, and Radio Atinati continued production of content with M-TAG grant support, and under supervision of their IREX mentors. Goodweb has redesigned the desktop versions of the livepress.ge, qartli.ge, and Channel 9 websites and has developed their mobile versions, in addition to websites of Radio Atinati and TV Borjomi. M-TAG organized two group trainings, one in January (for 16 participants) and another in February (for 17 participants), to strengthen capacity of its partners in online sales. Pikria Goginashvili taught M-TAG's media partners how to advertise on social media, and Levan Tabidze taught them how to produce advertising banners for web. Qartli.ge and livepress.ge received assistance in sales under a new model, with Innova consultant acting as a sales director for their agents. The Ethics Charter examined 17 cases and trained 19 journalists on how to report stories on minors in conflict with the law. The Charter also issued a guideline about separation of advertising and editorial materials. MEC continued to develop relationships with different donors, hosting 234 individual students, 140 of whom were female, from four different Georgian universities and participants of the US Embassy-supported "16 Women for Change" project. During this quarter, IREX M-TAG published one Facebook post on project activities, which garnered 828 views on Facebook. The Facebook page increased its number of likes from 1,476 to 1,500. From March 2019, Giorgi Shubitidze joined M-TAG as Monitoring & Evaluation specialist, replacing Erekle Natadze, who left M-TAG to join Tetra Tech ARD. The M&E specialist focused on tasks from the Performance Monitoring Plan (PMP) and Y5 workplan, which included data collection from 14 RMSI partners. Data was also collected on M-TAG trainings and recorded in the internal database. The database contains information including the number of training opportunities, unique participants, locations, gender, and age of training participants. The M&E specialist worked on an MCAT tool to measure changes in partner organization content quality, analyzing 454 media products produced by RMSI partners in October and November 2018. The bi-annual MCAT report is enclosed with this quarterly report. The M&E specialist also prepared a GIS report based on the training database, covering information on the trainings implemented, participants trained, and location of trainings. The M&E specialist regularly provided detailed monitoring information to M-TAG team members on individual partners for management purposes. In the reporting period, the M&E specialist checked data for accuracy and completeness, cleaned it, and then analyzed it.