MEDIA TRAINING: NUJ FCT Correspondents’ Chapel Partners ICIR on Data, Multimedia Journalism

Oru Leonard

The Nigeria Union of Journalists ( NUJ  ) FCT Correspondents’ Chapel is set to partner and collaborate with the International Centre for Investigative Reporting  ( ICIR ) on the training of journalists especially in the area of data journalism, fact checking, open source intelligence and multimedia journalism.

The Chairman of the Chapel Mr. Jide Oyekunle stated this at weekend when the Exco members of the Chapel visited the ICIR  office in Abuja on the need for strategic partnership and collaboration in organising periodic training and capacity building for journalists .

He said the training is aimed at enriching and validating the reportorial skills and knowledge of their members and also acquaint them with using of data and statistics in writing stories instead of traditional way of storytelling and narrative journalism.

Oyekunle said the partnership was borne out of the good and cordial relationship that have existed between the ICIR and media as a whole.

He noted that over the years the center have played a significant and remarkable roles in raising the bar of excellence of journalism through investigative journalism by holding government authorities and officials to account.

He stressed that technology revolution has changed and impacted journalism profession in so many ways in the areas and the need for their members to improve their skills in the new techniques in news reportage, content creation and fight against fake news, disinformation and misinformation.

According to the NUJ FCT Correspondents’ Chairman  ” We are here  today to formally request for partnership and collaboration with your organisation in organising  periodic training and capacity building for our members which cut across different media organisations.

” Training and capacity building is the fulcrum  of out agenda and programmes which we have set out to achieve  within the three years of our tenure in office. We know that ICIR set the pace and hold the ace when it comes to requisite training for media practitioners.

” The area of training we are talking about here includes ;data  journalism, fact checking  open source investigation, multimedia journalism and many more which has now become the face of modern day journalism.

” Journalists nowadays have to produce stories for a multimedia world  as a result  of technology revolution and media pluralism therefore putting reporters under undue pressure and effective weapon against misinformation, disinformation and fake news”

Responding the Managing Editor ICIR, Mr. Ajibola Hamzat commended the NUJ FCT Correspondent Chapel delegation for taking their time to visit the center saying it has shown that the new leadership of the Chapel is committed to the vision of changing the face of journalism profession for better.

He said ICIR was established with the vision of ensuring positive change of the country and set a pace for good and responsible journalism through training.

According to Hamzat ” In 2012 when we registered as an NGO our mission is just to go into the news room and train people about different area of journalism as many as are willing to be trained.

” We are glad that you are here and i can tell you that we are very excited and we are willing to work with your chapel going forward.

” You talked about the number of area we need to handle i think they are very important.  Yes, we are very strong in data journalism because deliberately we have a data department.  It was not by accident because we realise that data is now journalism and journalism is now data. You cannot separate one from other ”

On her own the Programme Manager,
Agema Gloria said the center is ready to train members of the Chapel just as she encouraged the journalists to deploy the skills after the training their various newsrooms.

According to her ” For instance multimedia journalism training  is so easy that at the end of the day, once you have that training you should be able to do a lot of things with your colleagues and train a lot of people “