Over 25 students, drawn from the Ghana Institute of Journalism, Central University College, University of Ghana and the Africa University College of Communications, are digging up data and processing it into developmental stories, after a training programme at Journoshop II.
The training, which was the second, was organized by iJourno Africa, an organization training student journalists to use new media tools and data to tell compelling developmental stories on the African continent.
A director of iJourno Africa and host of the Citi Breakfast Show, Bernard Avle, in his presentation charged the students to be more critical with data which will give them the insight to produce gripping stories.
“The tool for moving from raw data to something insightful is question; hence data journalism is using questions to get insight from raw data. Rigorous questions are the most important tools for a journalist in the 21st century.”
A data journalist and lecturer at the University of Windsor in Canada, Carolyn Thompson later led the students to interesting places on the internet to find data on Ghana to produce great stories.
She also exposed them to an open data on Ghana which could serve as authentic source of data for very good stories.
Journoshop II was different in many ways because it was very practical, as the third facilitator, former AJ+/Aljazeera multimedia journalist, Sandister Tei taught the students how to visualize the stories after mining, cleaning and analyzing the data.
Sandister, who now works with Citi FM, made them use various infographic platforms like Canvas, Piktochart among others, to create a story.
The student journalists are currently mining data from different sources in the country to produce their own stories.
One of them, Marie-Franz Fordjoe, determined to be a great journalist said; “Wow! This was very insightful. It is so different and I loved it.”
Angela Bortey, a level 300 student of the Ghana Institute of Journalism said she believes iJourno Africa programmes will make her stand out as a student journalist and later when she eventually starts to fully practice.
“I’m really happy I came, the exercises were insightful. I didn’t know much about this and I think I’m going to stick with it because it is future of journalism.”
The Founder of iJourno Africa, who has won both international and local journalism awards, Nana Boakye-Yiadom said he was happy with progress of work so far.
“The crop of students who came are very intelligent. The most important thing is that, this group consisted of students from Journoshop I and some new faces, which means we have consistency because we do not want wholesale production. We want only very serious students who really want to be ‘360 journalists’ who want o apply what they have learnt.”
Mr Boakye-Yiadom also revealed that iJourno Africa is course to start chapters in Kenya, Senegal and Ivory Coast by the end of the first quarter of 2016.
iJourno Africa has an ambitious target to raise about 1,000 data journalists by the end of 2017.
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By: Citifmonline.com/Ghana