Thursday, October 29, 2009

The Superb Day Four


Heading on



The day started by a continuation of websites visits where we visited aljazeera.net and IPS news. On Aljazeera’s website we managed to inquire about Prof. Manfred Nowak, a UN special rapporteur on tourture.

Our visit to IPS news brought a thoughtful opportunity to journalists in Tanzania after Mr. Gideon Marko, Information officer of MISA-Tanzania, informed the workshop that journalists in Tanzania also have a chance to write and send news and pictures to IPS News; he said with news articles they can get paid up to $180 and $50 for pictures. This was indeed good news to many participants of the workshop.

Mr. Marko, who is also working with IPS News, added that at a greater extent IPS News is not charging media outlets taking news from it. Mr. Peik Johansson also observed that such opportunity is very important to journalists in Tanzania and Africa to counter-report, the negative coverage done by western media to Africa. He cited an example of Ghana elections as an event which did not get enough coverage because it was democratically done; unlike the 2007 Kenyan elections. He added that even Tanzania elections are normally not well reported. IPS News also publishes its content in Swahili.

Another task was to visit MISA website and try tracing its contacts and those of its staff members including the Information Officer (Gideon Marko).

We also got a chance of learning the procedures of linking websites on the posts published in our blogs. This task was followed by an exercise of searching email addresses, telephone numbers and other contacts of various organization including MCT, TANAPA, Ministry of Health; also contacts of Barrack Obama and Information Officer of Amnesty International.

The last part of today's sesion was on practical assignment. He we looked at ways of using internet in checking facts. For example how can a journalist verify the data of 2004 Nobel Peace Prize winner (Wangari Maathai), getting the background information of an event, organistion etc, football fixtures, results, qualifyings, standings and updates. Later the facilitator ended the session by leaving an assignment of searching online information for feature writing.

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