Natalya Napolskaya

I was born in the city of Shymkent in southern Kazakstan in 1989 and grew up there. After secondary school, I moved to Almaty, the cultural capital of the country, and it was there that I got actively involved in journalism. I studied journalism at the Kazak National University.

My parents are engineers by profession and my older brother also has technical background. My older sister is a journalist with the state TV station Khabar.

I had my first journalistic experience when I was 17 and was still at school. I wrote news reports for the state regional newspaper Yuzhnyi Kazakstan (South Kazakstan). I moved on to write more serious articles for the private newspaper Rabat and at the same time worked as a TV journalist and a presenter of a youth programme.

While at university, I continued to work for various media outlets. These included Internews Kazakstan on their programmes Ayna (Mirror) and Open Asia; news portal Stan TV and the TV and radio station Channel 31. Currently, I am editor of the markets section of Vzglyad (View) newspaper.



Journalism has been my first and only professional experience. I first took part in an IWPR training course in 2006 in Almaty and later I underwent training in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. I take pleasure in writing to international standards. Although I now also work for other publications, it was IWPR that taught me how to construct stories.

Taking part in IWPR training sessions and as well as in seminars on training the trainers enabled me to teach journalism faculty students.

The subjects I have covered for IWPR range widely from illegal gambling dens to illegal abortions to the promotion of NGOs sympathetic to the government. I have also written about how journalists have been discouraged from forming trade unions.

The most important thing that I took from IWPR courses is that a report should be objective and balanced, that the writer should not express an opinion and should employ different views to reflect the full picture.

It is difficult to say what makes me proud, but what makes me happy is that the profession can help ordinary people. I believe this is very important. I am glad to be able to call myself a journalist.