The Daily Trust Foundation has urged media practitioners and journalists to intensify tracking of government budgets.

Daily Trust Foundation (DTF), an arm of the Media Trust, the publisher of Daily Trust Newspapers, gave the charge during a three-day Investigation and Data Journalism training organised for North East journalists in Gombe and was supported by MacArthur Foundation.

The Chairman of the Foundation, Malam Bilya Bala, tasked the media to stand with the masses in the face of the current economic challenges.

“The media must be firm in accountability, transparency and investigative reports. The people have so much confidence in the media, they count on you and we should not let them down. We have been training media practitioners across the country and giving scholarships to indigent students with outstanding performance in different universities,” Bala said.

A media scholar with City, University of London, Dr. Abdullahi Tasiu Abubakar, in his paper, “Accountability Journalism at Subnational Level” said that a large chunk of corruption occurs at subnational levels but unreported while paying more attention at the national level.

He said “If we can pay attention to accountability journalism at the grassroots, hold our leaders to account, most of our problems of banditry, insurgency and others will reduce because development will spring and employment rate will go up.”

Also, the Data Editor BBC Africa, Mr. Damilola Ojetunde, spoke on data mining, extraction, and analysis. Ojetunde said that journalists should prioritise using data to validate their reportage, saying that international best practice has shifted to data-driven stories.

Ojetunde said there are many ways journalists could mine data and charged the practitioners to acquire the skill of using reliable data.

Ojetunde charged journalists at sub-national levels to hold the government more accountable as the revenue collections have been increased by a reasonable percentage.