A TOTAL of 40 Journalists in Kogi State have participated in multimedia newsroom training.
The one-day training workshop on Thursday was organized by Stallion Times Media Service LTD., the publisher of Stallion Times newspaper.
Stallion Times Media Services Ltd. is implementing a 3-year Participatory Governance and Media Literacy project tagged “Get Involved, Dialogue and Improve (G-DRIP)” in Kano and Kogi states, under the Collaborative Media Project (Collaborating for media independence and government accountability), funded by the MacArthur Foundation.
G-DRIP Program Coordinator, Stallion Times, Isiyaku Ahmed in his opening address, said that the 40 participants were selected from different media platforms in Kogi State to broaden their knowledge of multimedia newsroom journalism.
He said: “In today’s world of media convergence, news storytelling and the way people consume news has changed.
“The traditional news outlets are now evolving to content convergence in the media space and the news organizations have moved to multimedia, using multi-platforms to tell stories.
“Reporters and editors needed to be empowered and with the necessary skills that would make them tell stories in social spaces, which now accommodate a large audience.
“We at Stallion Times recognize the importance of embracing and using new technologies and platforms to effectively convey stories that resonate with the audience in the digital age.
“This workshop, therefore, is designed to introduce the concept of multimedia newsroom storytelling that caters to all sorts of audiences and platforms.
“It will help journalists appreciate the use of technology to deliver investigative reports in a blend of text, static images, animation, video, and audio clips.”
While signing out, Ahmed urged the participants to practice the knowledge and experience gained and step down the training in their media organizations.
The resource person, Stephen Salawu took the journalists through the ‘concept and effective use of multimedia’ and essential skills and tools for multimedia journalism.
Stephen Enoch, a Stallion Times Monitoring and Evaluation Officer, Stephen Enoch took participating journalists through practicals on how to use some editing tools, among them were Canva, Lumen 5, and Adobe Premiere Pro.
In an interview shortly after the event, Grace Ben Kato, Deputy News Editor of ‘The Graphics Newspaper’ expressed that the training has broadened her experience in the use of multimedia.
“I have learned a lot about how to use different tools of multimedia to tell compelling stories.
“As a participant in this training, it will help to improve my journalistic skills,” Kato added.
Another participant, Aliyu Muhammed Lawal, Managing Editor, Core News, said: “This training has been very insightful because the media is a vast world with different updates.
“Attending this training today has made me learn different ways of editing videos with myriads of application tools to tell stories in a succinct way.
“As the Managing Editor of my online newspaper, I will step down this training to my reporters to boost the creativity of my news outlet.”
Ishak Dan-Iman, a Senior Correspondent with Voice of Nigeria (VON) said the training session has exposed him to existing technological editing software.
Ishak Dan-Iman, a Senior Correspondent with Voice of Nigeria (VON)
He said: “I am equally impressed with the practical demonstrations on the use of Canva to create multimedia content in line with the dynamics of journalism.”
