By Amos Aar
ABUJA-based online newspaper, National Record, on Wednesday ended a 2-day training and capacity building workshop on the theme: “Fact-Checking and Data Journalism,” with reporters from various media platforms.
The capacity-building programme, held in Abuja, was the third and final training by National Record in 3-year programme started in 2022 under the coordination of the Wole Soyinka Centre for Investigative Journalism (WSCIJ) in a project themed ‘Collaborative Media Engagement for Development Inclusivity and Accountability’ (C-MEDIA) with funding support by the MacArthur Foundation.
Participants in this year’s training were drawn from the print, electronic and online media organisations.
Speaking at the opening session of the programme on Tuesday, Iduh Onah, the Publisher/Editor-in-Chief of National Record, said the broad objective of the training is to sensitise young journalists on the essence of fact-checking especially in this era of social media.
Onah explained that this year, National Record resolved to refocus the training from investigative journalism to fact-checking and data journalism because the information revolution as a result of the social media which have turned citizens to journalists, with many journalists sourcing their stories from social media platforms such as WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, among many others, with little or no effort to fact-check, a trend he described as “worrisome”.
He urged journalists to always verify every information they obtain from social media platforms before publishing apart from making conscious efforts to engage in fact-checking in an age of information disorder marked by deliberate misinformation.
Onah noted that trainings organised by National Record in the first two years focused on investigative journalism in line with the core objective of the C-MEDIA project.
“The conviction of WSCIJ is that if reporters are trained on the basic methodologies of investigative reporting, and are refocused on investigating activities of especially those in power, those in leadership position especially at sub-national levels, such reports.” will be able to impact on all those at the national level, state and local government levels.
“In the past two years, we have done several stories mainly from the rural areas,” Onah stated.
He added that the WSCIJ and the MacArthur Foundation had stressed the importance of accountability reporting to expose corrupt activities of operators of governance at the state and local levels and as well as operators in the private sector especially in the area of environmental pollution and other unwholesome activities at sub-national levels.
There were four presentations in all, which dwelt in detail on the subject matters fact-checking, data journalism and the impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI).
In his presentation on “Introduction to Fact-checking and Verification”, programme manager, Daily Trust Foundation, Abuja, Dr Theophilus Abbah, drilled participants on necessary skills and knowledge for verifying stories to avoid publishing “emotions and biases”.
He tasked journalists to always verify press statements from government officials and public institutions and avoid publishing malicious stories that are aimed at destroying individuals in the interest of sources even when the information is true.
Abbah also spoke exposed participants to a number of online websites reporters should utilise to fact-check stories, pictures and videos.
On his part, a CFA fact-checker, Mr Martins Ayotunde, who trained the participants on how to identify and fact-check social media platforms under the topic, “Platforms Investigation: An Introduction to Social Media Investigation,” cautioned against ‘Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior (CIB)’ such as copy and paste with the aim of manipulating public opinion and spreading misinformation or influencing discourses on burning issues.
Day 2 of the programme featured Victoria Bamas, the Editor of the International Centre for Investigative Reporting (The ICIR), who in her presentation entitled, “Fact- Checking Visual Claims: Image Verification, Video Verification, and Fact-checking Websites,” enlightened the participants on tricks used to manipulate videos, websites and audios and how to verify all these anomalies.
Like Abbah, but in greater technical detail, Ayotunde and Bamas elaborated on methods of using websites to verify information in various formats, especially those obtained from social media and the web.
Similarly, Mr Diego Okenyodo, the Executive Director, Akweya TV, Abuja, took the participants through “Leveraging Data Journalism and Artificial Intelligence for News and Content Innovation,” sensitising them on how to use Artificial Intelligence (AI) responsibly to tell their stories based on facts.
Okeyodo encouraged journalists to adopt the use of data in telling their stories so as to motivate people to read, noting that with the availability of many sources of information at people’s disposal these days, they no longer have time and interest to read lengthy stories and articles.
