Astana – Journo Professors, originally uploaded by Wordyeti.

These are the journalism professors from the university here in Astana, Kazakhstan, that were in my training session. I ran a little long – they didn’t want to let me go — the students & faculty are intensely interested in how the rest of the world is using the internet to report & gather the news.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to really pull out all of the tools in my bag of tricks, because we didn’t have an internet connection. And yes, I realize the irony inherent in that.

The market here is right at the cusp of where things start to get interesting for the media – internet penetration is at about 18% (although some skeptics scoff at that, and say that it more like 2%). But it’s at 20% that we start to see the development of all kinds of new businesses, and that’s what is on the minds of the editors. They have seen the crisis that has eveloped the media in the U.S. and they most definitely do NOT want to go there…