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Cape Town: Congress 2008 of the World Association of Christian Communicators (WACC) will
go in the history of some African journalists as a source of knowledge which
they had not previously known.
The journalists drawn from Zimbabwe, Nigeria,
Tanzania, Kenya, South Africa and Malawi report that they have benefitted a lot from a
'Peace Reporting Workshop' run by veteran journalists Stephen Brown and
Peter Kenny from the Geneva-based Ecumenical News International (ENI).
The
journalists attending the week-long workshop at the WACC
Congress in Cape Town participated in courses and discussions which they
last had during their journalism training."The workshop is very
informative. I think journalists need training like this to enable them to champion
for peace through their reporting, and not exacerbate conflicts like they mostly
do," said the Uganda-based Redemtor Atieno, who was born in Kenya. The journalists
have gone through topics such as how to avoid inflammatory reporting in
conflicts zones. In a continent where there have been conflicts in Kenya,
Zimbabwe, Sudan, South Africa, Burundi, Somalia and Rwanda, the importance of a
peace reporting workshop cannot be over-empasised for the African
journalists. "It has been a wonderful training getting experiences of people
in the field in the region, involved in promoting peace," said Frank Jomo, a
journalist from Malawi. Frank Nzwili, the East Africa correspondent for the
ENI said the practical exercises of the workshop taught him how stories are
edited. "We have managed to get some experiences which we had not gotten in our
media houses," he said. Munyaradzi Makoni, a freelance journalist from Zimbabwe who
operates in South Africa, said: "It was an eye opener because the workshop
incorporated aspects that are usually looked for in international news in terms
of reporting peace." The journalists were reminded of the '10 rules of for
writing news.' The rules include: "Avoid judgments and inferences," and 'Write
simply, succintly, honestly and quickly.'
Columbus S. Mavhunga, Journalist, Zimbabwe
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