The Nigeria Union of Journalists, NUJ -FCT Correspondents’ Chapel is set to collaborate with the International Centre for Investigative Reporting, (ICIR) on the periodic training and capacity building for journalists, specifically in the areas of data journalism, fact checking, open source intelligence and multimedia journalism.
This was disclosed by the Chairman of the Chapel, Jide Oyekunle, who visited ICIR office alongside other Executive members of the Chapel, over the weekend, in Abuja.
Oyekunle said the training is aimed at enriching and validating the reportorial skills and knowledge of their members and also acquaint them with the usage of data and statistics, in writing stories instead of the traditional way of storytelling and narrative journalism.
While maintaining that the partnership was borne out of the cordial relationship that have existed between the ICIR and media as a whole, He noted that over the years, the center have played significant roles in raising the bar of excellence of journalism through investigative journalism, by holding government authorities and officials to account.
He stressed that the revolution of technology has impacted journalism profession in so many ways, which challenges newsmen to improve their skills in the new techniques of news reportage, content creation and fight against fake news, disinformation and misinformation.
According to the Chairman, “We are here today to formally request for partnership and collaboration with your organisation in organising periodic trainings and capacity building for our members which cuts across different media organisations.
“Training and capacity building is the fulcrum of our 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.”
In his response, the Managing Editor ICIR, Ajibola Hamzat, who commended the NUJ-FCT Correspondent Chapel for being committed to the vision of changing the face of journalism profession for better, maintained that, ICIR is all out to set a pace for good and responsible journalism, through training.
In his words, “Since 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 part however, the Programme Manager, Agema Gloria said that “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 as well.”
She commended the leadership of the chapel for taking out time to visit the center.