To teach the younger generation of journalists how to do their job better, National Point Newspaper/Foreword Communications Limited, last week, organized a two-day media training for journalists from across the Niger Delta region.
The programme which held at Habitat Hotel Port Harcourt, was a collaborative project with the Wole Soyinka Center for Investigative Journalism with support from the MacArthur Foundation. The training took the participants through topics like ‘Ethics, Media and Development’, ‘Exploring The Landscape of Insecurity in the Niger Delta,’ ‘Data Journalism’, ‘Gender Sensitive Reporting’, ‘Human Rights Reporting, Investigative Journalism’ among others.
In her remarks, Ibiba DonPedro, managing director National Point Newspapers and Foreword Communications Limited said investigative journalism is very important in the job of a journalist pointing out that it goes beyond news.
She maintained that investigative journalism digs up information, data, and exposes wrong doings and by so doing; it ensures that there will be redress and sanity in the system.
She said “For instance, somebody’s rights has been abused or somebody who is entrusted with public office loots the funds, it is the duty of the journalist to track how that happened and expose it to the public and make sure that if it is a criminal case, justice is served. And if it is a human rights violation for instance, the person gets redress and closure.”
Encouraging the journalists, she said, “Journalism that creates the kind of journalists who are comfortable, passionate and forever ready to do their work comes from a buoyant economy. Adding that there was no way you are going to get a journalist that is uncomfortable and able to enforce the ethics of the profession.
“For instance, if you are told not to collect money from people who are at the centre of what you are probing, you shouldn’t do that because you will become biased. …the only way we can do it, is to work and be conscious of these challenges and realities and know that journalists have to be paid, if you want to enforce these kinds of principles.
“We need to empower ourselves and actually be prepared to do what we can, to be a change to this society. We have to empower ourselves and there are resources for journalists all over the world. I want to always encourage other people to stay and if I encourage you to stay, then I have to be part of the process to empower you to enable you not to collect.”
These are some of the things we are beginning to do with the support of Wole Soyinka Center for Investigative Journalism and MacArthur Foundation.
Ibiba said the media is facing global challenges.
“What we are facing today is global. The media space is changing and we have to change along with it. You have to work more. You can create a blog or YouTube page where you have information that people can pay for,” she suggested.
Speaking on gender sensitive reporting, Constance Meju, the managing editor of National Point newspaper said, gender sensitive reporting is about portraying issues about both gender fairly.
She said “It’s about portraying issues around both gender fairly because we believe and understand that for the world to move forward, both gender need to work together.
“We are talking about it because in Nigeria, there is a serious under representation of women.”
She said women are missing on the media front despite the growing number of qualified women and the contributions of women to the economy.
“We want the media to think women when they write their stories. Many women are qualified to make contributions to development and we want to hear their voices and see their faces because if we don’t hear their voices, you will not know the issues that are troubling them. And you can’t come out with good policies if you don’t understand what women represent”.
Continuing, Meju stated, “Women are half the population of this country and they contribute to the economic development of this country so our society should take into consideration their needs, anxieties and their expectations.
In his presentation on data journalism, Sunny Dada, development journalist, explained that data journalism is a very important component of journalism practice today adding, that as a journalist, one of the qualities that you should have is to understand the times and the trends.
Dada said, “The challenge we have in our society currently is that the reading culture is gradually going down and lot of persons are becoming impatient to stay on longer content. As a journalist, if you must get people to give attention to your content, you have look for a creative way to quickly send across your message without losing the interest of the reader and one of the best ways to do it is to engage in data journalism”.
Data journalism he said, makes use of lesser words yet conveys the messages through data, sets that comprise of the variables that are very relevant to the subject matter that one wants to communicate.
He stated, “Data journalism will help you to investigate this latent factor. So you have to investigate the linkages and capture them so that they speak to the subject matter. With that, it gives you a broader understanding of what the subject matter is.
He said every journalist should be able to understand how the trend is going, adding, ”if you don’t update yourself, over time, you discover that you have become redundant in the industry”.
“Since journalism is evolving from word journalism to data journalism, the journalist should also evolve in terms of knowledge, use of tools and the average journalist should update himself in the knowledge of use of these tools,” he added.
Speaking on Ethics, Media and Development, former Nigerian Institute of Public Relations national president, Amaopusenibo Bobo Brown disclosed that the first thing the Nigerian journalist must understand is that the global market is competitive and so he must organize himself to be competitive in terms of news management.
Brown said breaking news is not the way it used to be and because of global developments, the Nigerian journalist cannot compete with CNN, SKY and Aljazeera for breaking news.
He advised, “We can create our own breaking news by pointing in the direction that has hampered development in our regions and in our nation. We can work together. Nigerian journalist must plan to break the structural impediment of operating alone by planning to work together and collaborating on major stories that can help our people understand the reason for the poverty in the country and the reason for the lack of development.
The media guru urged journalists to begin to target Nigerian diaspora communities wherever they are with our stories to track the huge sums of money that have left Nigeria as a result of collaboration between politicians and some of our sons and daughters overseas.
“To track projects that were promised, voted for, money provided and yet not done. The capacity of Nigerian diaspora communities to invest in economic revival of Nigeria adding that every year, Nigeria constitutes the highest donor communities of foreign remittance to Africa.
“So through collaboration, Nigerian journalists must work to create that because without that, the economy will not find efficiency, will not find competitiveness and poverty will remain dominant in our environment,” the veteran journalist said.
Styvn Obodoekwe, human rights activist and journalist while teaching on human rights reporting stated that human rights journalism offers a critical reflection of the experience and needs of victims of human rights violations adding that it is a journalism that challenges rather than reinforce impunities.
The training drew about 49 participants from Bayelsa, Delta, Edo and Rivers states with the main objective of deepening the understanding of journalists in the region for robust engagement with political and community leaders for good governance.
Aqua Akporuku one of the participants at the training thanked the organisers stating that she will utilize what she has learnt to better her work.
