Campus journalists charged on reporting balanced narratives, pursuing solutions stories

STUDENT journalists drawn from tertiary institutions across the country and Ghana have been charged to focus attention on reporting about the resilient spirit of Africans in a more balanced way.

The charge was handed down when media training hub, I-79 Media Consults, trained about 30 campus journalists in the concept of solutions journalism as part of the 2022 LEDE Fellowship facilitated by the Solutions Journalism Network (SJN).

One of the resource persons and executive director of the Media Challenge Initiative (MCI) based in Uganda, Abaas Mpindi, who spoke on ‘News Framing and Reporting Africa through SoJo Lenses’ charged the participants to equally focus on positive narratives and events about the continent just as attention is given to negative narratives.

Stressing the need for a more balanced narrative about Africa, he said, “solutions-oriented reporting will not only call out the wrong narratives, but will also provide evidence to counter them.”

Speaking in the same vein, a lecturer at Fountain University, Rasheed Adebiyi, urged the students to use solutions journalism as a way to hold public office holders accountable.

Adebiyi said: “Solutions journalism is a slant of developmental journalism and a form of investigative reporting that holds people accountable, discovers a response, investigates and draws insights as well as presents evidence.”

Explaining further, the founder of Egab, Dina Aboughazala, disclosed that solutions journalism can be a tool for accountability directly or indirectly.

ALSO READ FROM  NIGERIAN TRIBUNE

• Nurse Holds Doctor Hostage In OAU Teaching Hospital, Resident Doctors Plan Strike
• Woman’s Corpse, Unconscious Man Found Inside Office In Aba After Four Days
• Hoodlums Attack Lagos Governor’s Press Crew Bus In Tinubu’s Convoy, Two Injured
• [BREAKING] #EkitiDecides2022: INEC Declares APC’s Biodun Oyebanji Winner Of Guber Poll
• Top 10 Business Ideas In Nigeria You Can Start With 100,000 Naira
• 2023: Kwankwaso Will Not Be Deputy To Obi —NNPP

Other speakers at the training include Seun Durojaiye, the founder of Social Voices; Innocent Eteng, the founder and Co-editor at Prime Progress; Chibuike Alagboso, a senior journalist with the Nigerian Health Watch and Lekan Otufodunrin, the Executive Director of Media Career Development Network (MDCN) harped on the importance of solutions journalism and how it can be used to drive positive changes in respective communities.

Meanwhile, a Senior Reporter with the Nigerian Tribune, Ifedayo Ogunyemi, whose LEDE fellowship project catalysed the training, explained that the project seeks to equip campus reporters on how to “constructively report responses to the various challenges bedevilling the tertiary education system in West Africa.”

He added that the project will “give a rise to a crop of campus ambassadors who will create SoJo units in their respective campuses,” adding that “it is high time we also focus on what we are getting right, not just the problems, in Africa.”

He further noted that the Campus Solutions project is being funded by the SJN as part of efforts to spread solutions journalism across the world, adding that it will provide small grants to select 15 student journalists to carry out solutions reports in the academic environments.

One of the participants who also benefited from the grants, Akanuweir Ayikpeinyer, said the training puts him in the right state of mind and prepares him to become an effective solutions journalist.

Another participant, Monsuroh Abdulsemiu, said: “The facilitators patiently explained their (solutions journalism-focused) topics and tactically engaged the trainees. I’ve been yearning to learn about data visualisation, and Mr Ogunyemi talked about it during his session.”