Africa Media Development Foundation (AMDF) has trained journalists in Kaduna, Northwest, Nigeria, on contemporary media contents to improve their skills.
Executive Director of the Foundation, Mr. Iliya Kure, said at the end of the training on Friday that it was to acquaint the journalists with skills and knowledge on how to make corrections and improve on the general flow in contemporary media contents.
According to him, the training was in line with the foundation’s vision of providing professional support to media practitioners and development communication professionals.
He explained that the 10 months training was due to poor media content observed by the foundation while tracking output of media houses in Kaduna.
“Prior to the training, we understood that there is poor output from news media, as a result of that, we decided to come up with a training program to enhance the capacity of the journalists,” Kure said.
“We focused more on basic journalism skills. What is needed in news writing, the technicalities in news writting, development journalism and new media and on how they integrate into a changing media landscape.
“You can’t be a journalist and fail to understand the terrain where you operate and the tools of your operations.”
One of the participants, David Turaki of DITV/Alheri Radio, Kaduna, said that the training has helped him to know more about development journalism.
Turaki said that due to the numerous challenges in the society and inability of citizens to speak to government, uncountable developmental issues have remained hidden.
“With this training, I can easily talk about societal ills in a more professional way and be able to hold the government accountable by speaking better and convincingly on how to better the lives of the citizens.”
Another participant, Hannatu Musa, a communication officer with AMDF, said the training had helped her do more in discharging her duties as a communication personnel.
She also said that the training which included development journalism, investigative journalism and basics in journalism, helped her to write news stories better.
“Earlier before this training, we usually had errors in our grammatical expressions and incoherent writing skills just to make sure the job is done, now we can be able to write in a more coherent and professional way”, she said.
(NAN)
