Thursday, October 20, 2011

First day at an investigative internet training

Good morning to all and warm greetings from Dar es Salaam. This is my first posting from a training course on investigative internet journalism arranged here at the Tanzania Global Development Learning Centre (TGDLC) at the Institute of Finance Management in Kivukoni in the more green side of the city centre.

The training course is part of an internet training programme for Tanzanian journalists co-arranged by MISA Tanzania and VIKES Foundation, a solidarity organization of the Union of Journalists in Finland, with support from the Finnish Ministry for Foreign Affairs.

This training is already the 13th internet training course arranged within the programme which has been running since 2008. Previous, more general internet courses have focused on editors from national mainstream media, radio producers, and local reporters and journalism lecturers in Dar es Salaam, Mwanza, Zanzibar and Arusha. Earlier this year, the first Swahili-language training courses were held in Morogoro, Iringa and Dodoma.

This week we have a very active and talkative group in class with so far seven participants from some of the major national newspapers, a radio channel and TBC, the government broadcasting company.

So there’s been lots of debates about many topics: Can you pay for receiving some crucial information for your investigative story? What to do when your editor doesn’t want to publish your investigative story because the media company might then step on the feet of some of the powerful in politics or big business? Can your trust what is said in the social media, meaning discussion forums, blogs or Facebook?

Yesterday was the first day of the training, and after introduction and listing of expectations we spent a big part of the day going through definitions of what is investigative journalism and what is investigative internet journalism.

The latter can be understood in at least two different ways:

The first definition would be that it is a new stage of investigative reporting where you make use of the possibilities of interactivity provided by social media resources, or use the online media for the publication and follow-up of your investigative reporting.

The other definition would be that it is just high-quality journalism that goes a bit deeper than ordinary reporting by making use of the tremendous amount of information in the internet for finding facts, backgrounds and context, and simply investigating the story you are working on.

We will concentrate more on the second option, but we will also publish drafts and stories online. Links to the blogs of the participants are in the column on the right.

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