September 7, 2011

PRINT / TRAINING: UNICEF trains journalists (NIGERIA)

Thanks to a workshop, many Nigerian journalists can now practice better. The workshop, which held in Kano, helped them to make better use of data obtained in the line of duty.

They confessed they had been shying away from data-driven story-writing. Reason: they lacked the skills to humanise data, a situation Dr. Ayobami Ojebode of the University of Ibadan described in his paper as “numerophobia” –the phobia for numbers or figures.

He said: “one of our big goals in the storytelling process is to humanise the statistics. It’s hard for people to care about numbers, especially large numbers”.

Ojebode quoted Westbrook (2010) to define data-driven news reporting as “journalism in its truest essence: uncovering what the public do not have enough time to do themselves, interrogating it, and making sense of it before sharing it with the audience”.

full article

No comments: