UGANDANS GET READY TO BE CITIZEN JOURNALISTS

It was a long week of learning, discovery and excitement where non professional journalists were trained to be journalists. Not journalists in the mainstream media but journalist in the alternative press which is citizen journalism. This training attracted farmers from rural areas, community based groups and Urban based NGOs  in Uganda. This diversifies of participants made it very lively and interactive. Some people have never used internet and this was the first time they interacted with the internet. Others, it was the first time to use a recorder and a digital Camera.  One would see the excitement people had when holding camera and taking photos and recording interviews.

Talk about the facilitators, Matthew and Brett were wonderful facilitators, very knowledgeable and conversant with what they were doing. I have attended several training workshops, but this is the first workshop where participants had real enough time to do practical exercises. Everyone had the opportunity to practise what was taught in theory I like the way how the workshop was structured.

Since this was TOT, I plan to conduct the same training. I am confident that I acquired all the necessary skills as well as the equipment to train others. I have always trained people on how to use web2.0 but this time I want to include in the concept of citizen Journalism.

Today, I was reading one of the local newspapers the New Vision and there was this story about Boda Bodas.  I was in the group that covered that covered the issue Boda Bodas during the training.  This article made me  reflect on what Brett told us about writing soft news and bringing in a bigger story, this writer begun with a story of one man and later talked brought it a bigger picture of Boda Bodas. This story in the New Vision was   not much different from ours only that this person had done in depth research. It was also accompanied by two photographs of Boda Bodas riders carrying passengers.

  I also drew a lot of learnings from Brett’s session on what’s news, how to gather news. I have always read newspapers and I had not taken time to categorise issues covered, people featured and where. This helped to understand the difference between the mainstream media and citizen journalism.