Emma Okonji
The need to build capacity in journalism was the focus of this year’s panel session, during the just concluded one day capability enhancement workshop for Journalists, organised by leading professional services firm, PwC Nigeria.
The workshop, which held in Lagos, had as participants, journalists across both traditional and new media platforms. It featured insightful presentations on various topics by subject matter specialists with the aim of building the capacity of journalists and enhancing their ability to execute their duties effectively while also better positioning themselves to take advantage of future opportunities.
The annual workshop, which is now in its fourth year with over 200 journalists benefitting from the training, is a major component of PwC’s corporate responsibility strategy. It was instituted in recognition of the very important role of the media in society and in particular, the role that the media in Nigeria has and continues to play in informing and educating the public.
In his opening remarks, Country Senior Partner, PwC Nigeria, Mr. Uyi Akapata, said: “Our support for the media through this workshop and the media excellence award is in line with our purpose which is to build trust in society and solve important problems. It is a demonstration of our strong belief that for the Nigerian people to enjoy good governance, the media must perform its role optimally and professionally and this is reflected in the quality of reporting, in the capacity of individual journalists to carry out research and investigations, in the independence of editorial judgments, and in their ability to use technology as an enabler.â€
The panel session focused its discussions featured :Publisher BusinessDay, Frank Aigbogun; Publisher CableNG, Simon Kolawole, and Wole Famurewa of CNBC Nigeria, who were the panelists at the session, focused more on the need for media owners to consider capacity building among journalists in order to fit into the global trend of data journalism in new reportage.
The session explored how technology is changing journalism, the issue of fake news and how journalists can prepare for the future.
While Aigbogun was pushing for capacity building, Kolawole dwelt more about the differences between opinion and facts in news reporting. He explained that facts are news with credible source, while opinion piece is a personal perspective of the reporter they may or may not be factual. Famurewa, in his views, stressed the need for credibility in news reporting and advised reporters to always verify their sources of information, before going to press.
This year, the workshop has been deepened and its scope expanded with an increase in the number of participating journalists especially from the online and new media channels whose impact in the way news is reported in Nigeria, has been quite transformational.
The presentations at the workshop included a session on “Tracking and Reporting the SDGs†facilitated by Mories Atoki, a senior manager and Sustainability Lead at PwC Nigeria. The session provided an expose what the sustainable development goals are and the various tools to navigate, track and report their attainment by Nigeria. Founder and lead partner at BudgIT, Seun Onigbinde, facilitated a session on “Using data to transform the news and provide insights. His session covered data journalism and feeding from the BudgIT experience, exposed participants to sources of data, cleaning and analysing data, providing key insights from data and telling stories through visualisation.
