Back to Index

HANA Pioneers Training for Zimbabwe Journalists
Highway Africa News Agency
April 16, 2007

http://www.sangonet.org.za/portal/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=6913&Itemid=1

Highway Africa News Agency hosted fifteen journalists from Zimbabwe this past week at the School of Journalism and Media Studies, Africa Media Matrix, Rhodes University. Through funding from The Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa (Zimbabwe) (OSISA-ZW), these journalists engaged in a digital journalism workshop, which ran from Thursday, 12 April until Saturday, 14 April 2007.

The workshop was held in partnership with The Media Institute of Southern Africa (Zimbabwe Chapter) (MISA), which was responsible for identifying the journalists who would benefit from the course.

This workshop comes at a time when Zimbabwean media landscape has shrunk considerably over the years, with many many newspapers being closed down by the government for allegedly flouting that country's stringent media laws. In the same period, Zimbabwe has also experienced a mushrooming of online publications, which are started by exiled Zimbabwean journalists abroad. These publications have slowly gained popularity especially among urban Zimbabweans and the estimated 3 million Zimbabweans living abroad.

Guthrie Munyuki, a freelance journalist who worked for the Daily Times; which has since closed down, said "this course is more empowering personally, because it teaches us the importance of ICTs and using them for development. The emergence of online publications says a lot about where we are going, as it is not only newspapers that make people communicate, cellphones and the internet are mediums too".

The training programme was aimed at teaching the journalists about online reporting; writing for online publications, how to conduct internet searches, taking, uploading and captioning their own pictures as well as blogging.

The trainees have already set up their blogs and are using these to publish those of their stories that are not picked up by the mainstream media. The freelance journalists among the group in particular expressed satisfaction with this method, saying that they saw blogging as a way of publishing their stories as widely as is possible.

A competition has been set up, which will see the journalist with the best blog receiving a full scholarship; which entails travel, accommodation and training costs, to attend the annual Highway Africa Conference, which is usually held in Grahamstown in September, as well as to attend further training courses being offered by the organisation.

The workshop was conducted by Professor Peter Verweij from the Netherlands' Utrecht University. He said that "the workshop was tailor-made for their [journalists] levels, they have learnt a lot of new things and got tools that they can take back to Zimbabwe with, to bring about change in the way they produce and disseminate news. With regards to the journalists' learning how to blog, "a new world has opened up", added Peter Verweij.

Visit the Highway Africa website: www.highwayafrica.ru.ac.za
To read latest reports by HANA visit: http://hana.ru.ac.za

For more information contact:

Katlego Gabashane, Marketing and Events officer, School of Journalism and Media Studies, Africa Media Matrix, Rhodes University. Tel: (046) 603 7108 Fax: (046) 603 7101 Website: http://jms.ru.ac.za/ e-mail: K.Gabashane@ru.ac.za

Please credit www.kubatana.net if you make use of material from this website. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License unless stated otherwise.

TOP