NUJ partners ICIR on data, multimedia journalism

The Nigeria Union of Journalists (NUJ) FCT Correspondents’ Chapel is set to partner 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 chapel chairman, Mr. Jide Oyekunle, who stated this recently when executive members of the chapel visited the ICIR office in Abuja, stressed the need for strategic collaboration in organising periodic training and capacity building for journalists.

He observed that the training is very critical, as journalists now produce stories for a multimedia world as a result of technological revolution and media pluralism, therefore, putting reporters under undue pressure and effective weapon against misinformation, disinformation and fake news.

Oyekunle stated that the ICIR has over the years played a significant role in raising the bar through its investigative journalism, by holding government authorities and officials to account, adding that the partnership is borne out of the good and cordial relationship existing between the ICIR and media as a whole.

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 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.

Responding, the Managing Editor ICIR, Mr. Ajibola Hamzat, commended the NUJ FCT Correspondent Chapel delegation for taking their time to visit the centre, 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 was just to go into the newsroom and train as many that are ready to be trained in different areas of journalism.

” 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 realised 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 centre is ready to train members of the chapel, just as she encouraged journalists to deploy the skills into practice after the training in their various newsrooms.

According to her, “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.”