Radio journalists across Nigeria have converged in Abuja, the nation’s capital for a four-day intensive radio journalism capacity-building workshop with the theme “What Makes Great Radio?”
The program organized by the US Embassy in Nigeria and in collaboration with Wole Soyinka Institute for Journalism, seeks to equip radio journalists with the skills to produce long-form investigative radio features and in-depth news reporting.
Speaking at the opening of the workshop, the Director of Broadcast and Digital Journalism at Stony Brook University, New York, Professor Steven Reiner spoke on the choice of the theme.
“Radio is widespread and an important source of information to several Nigerians. The sponsors of this workshop programme believe that strengthening radio production is a strong component of strengthening democratic journalism, and of course, strengthening journalism means strengthening democracy. So by extension, teaching the best practices of good radio journalism is a part of strengthening democracy in Nigeria”.
Fairness and balance
Speaking on fairness and balance in a story, Professor Reiner, disclosed that “Just being balanced for the sake of being balanced (meaning giving equal time to two sides) does not necessarily mean you are fair to the fact of the story. It can be in some stories you need to provide balance and present two points of view. But there are some stories and topics where overwhelming evidence is on one side and not on the other. You don’t necessarily need to give equal attention to both sides just for the sake of doing it. Fairness is more of a quality. Balance is more of a quantity. That’s what I mean by something can be fair and balanced, but it can be fair and somehow out of balance. And it can be balanced but not fair. Because you give a lot of attention to something that is not unconvincing or already proven not to be true” he said.
While speaking on rethinking content to captivate the listener, the Counselor for Public Affairs US Embassy, Abuja, Mr Adnan Siddiqi urged participating Journalists to diversify their reporting.
“Investigative journalism has an important role to play in democracy. The press and the media are the fourth estate. The main goal of what we want you to do is, to get a flavour of doing radio reporting and on new radio productions skills like the one from the American perspective, that you can adopt into your circumstances.”
Participants were drawn from different media houses.
Emmanuel Ukoh
