More pictures from class

Here are some more pictures from the training. Asia Khalfan is the managing

editor of the radio station Sauti ya Quran (Voice of Quran).

Athumani Shariff works as a journalism lecturer at Dar es Salaam School

of Journalism.

Mcharo Mrutu is a senior reporter at Channel Ten, one of the national TV

channels in Tanzania.

Nurdin Selemani is deputy chief editor of Radio France International

Kiswahili service.

Zuhura Selemani is a journalism lecturer at the University of Dar es Salaam

School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Photos Peik Johansson.

Final feedbacks from the last training day

On Friday, the final day of the training, the participants first searched for facts and figures and backgrounds about the economic relations between China and African countries and then proceeded to write a short story based on their findings. Afterwards, we also visited a long list of news websites and other web resources related to African and international affairs, among them also some very nice blogs run by young Kenyan women commenting on anything from politics to their human relationships – and writing in such a nice fashion...

At the end of the day, the training participants posted their final feedbacks from the training week. Everyone seemed to be pretty happy that their expectations were met.

Asia Khalfan of the radio station Sauti ya Quran says that before the training she always had difficulties in finding from the internet what she was searching for, but now she can easily find what she needs. She is already looking forward to sharing her new skills with her staff at her radio station.

Hamisi Kibari from Habari Leo says that he is now thinking of writing more researched feature stories – “because searching for material is no longer a torture!” He also says that he will use the knowledge and skills acquired from the training to help his colleagues in the newsroom, starting from next Monday.

“I have been using internet in several ways, but not accessing information easily. With this useful training, I received a package for a lifetime,” writes Zuhura Selemani, journalism lecturer at University of Dar es Salaam School of Journalism and Mass Communication. She also suggests that she would advice the head of her school to appoint her to train her colleagues to work with internet sources.

In the opinion of Athumani Shariff, Dar es Salaam School of Journalism, the best thing with the training was that it very practical. “I would like to say it was the right class in the very right time,” he concludes.

For a complete summary of almost everything we did during the week, see the story by Jane Mathias of Nipashe newspaper.

All other feedbacks can be found in the blogs, links are on the right.

For some interesting stories on the business relations between China and Africa, I would like to recommend the articles by Zuhura Selemani and Athumani Shariff. For Swahili readers, see also the story by Hamisi Kibari.

Otherwise, thanks to the whole class for the active debates and good participation. Many thanks to Cecilia Mng’ong’o of MISA-Tanzania for handling again all practical arrangements so well. Thanks to the catering at TaGLA for the delicious meals and snacks, and a great thank also to the IT support – which had a hard week this time due to the network challenges which were beyond our control.

Think first and other tips for fact-finding

Here’s some useful tips when searching for information from the web.

Think first, before going to the web.

What do you search for and where might you find it? Are you searching for simple facts, backgrounds or any other information that can develop your story? Should you google, or can you find the information on a specific website you already know? Do you find it from the internet, or better somewhere else?

Always monitor other news sites, both local and international, and also other web resources.

Choose right search words.

Try different Google search options – sometimes web, sometimes news, sometimes “all web”, sometimes only Tanzanian pages, or only Swahili language pages. You can also narrow your search by date, for last year, last month, last week or the last 24 hours only.

Open pages in a new tab. While the new pages are opening, you can continue reading the original page.

Add to favourites. Also open new files for your favourites. Then you will easier find the stories when you want to come back to them.

Follow the links in the stories you read.

Go to original sources.

Don’t always read everything, but scan for what is of your interest.

Don’t ever copy-paste! That’s plagiarism.

Print if necessary. Read as homework, underline.

Also make notes to your notebook and save drafts to a USB flash.

Here’s some more tips before you start writing the story.

Structure your story in your mind and on paper.

Decide what is relevant for your narrative.

Write simple with own words.

Quote when necessary.

Understand what you write (you are there to make things understandable for your audience).

Add details for human interest.

When you’re about to publish:

Provide links to original sources (if you publish online).

Always also think about headline, visual outlook, quotes, images, graphics etc.

Some general good advice for producing good investigative stories:

Spend much more time on the investigation than on the actual writing.

Plan your story into narrative chunks.

Also plan how you use your time
for research
for writing
for editing your text
for checking facts
and for delivering the final story.

How to avoid plagiarism

Plagiarism and the need for ethical reporting and true professionalism have been continuously on the agenda during the training days.

The website Plagiarism.org lists the following examples as plagiarism:

Turning in someone else’s work as your own

Copying words or ideas from someone else without giving credit

Failing to put a quotation in quotation marks

Changing words but copying the sentence structure without giving credit

Copying so many words or ideas from a source that it makes up the majority of your work, whether you give credit or not

For most journalists, editors and lecturers in class, the previous examples sound too familiar.

Then how can you avoid plagiarizing? In most cases by citing sources. By simply explaining that a part of the material has been borrowed, and providing your audience the information necessary to find the original source. That’s usually enough to prevent plagiarism.

Plagiarism has never been as easy as it is today. Before the internet, potential plagiarists would have had to go to the library and copy texts from books by hand. But the internet now makes it easy to find thousands of relevant sources in seconds, and in a few minutes one could find, copy and paste together an entire seminar paper, or a feature story.

But there’s no point in copy-pasting. You just make a much better story by writing in your own style and words. An editor or a teacher should also easily recognize passages that are directly copied, from the vocabulary used.

Journalists in any country caught plagiarizing can get sacked. If you are copying someone else’s story for an article published in your own name, you might also get sued for copyright infringement and be forced to pay heavy compensation. The same goes for publishing a photo without the permission of the copyright owner. In most of the world, the length of the copyright is usually 50 or 70 years after the death of the author. In Tanzania, 50 years.

The recommendation was that all participants would take their time and read the Tanzanian Copyright and Neighbouring Rights Act from 1999, found here as a PDF file on a UNESCO web portal where they have collected the copyright laws from most countries.

Here’s another link to a good BBC story about plagiarism, how easy it is, and how easily it can be detected.

A very late update on Thursday session

Here’s a late update about what we did on Thursday, when the network in the whole country was so bad, that I wasn't even able to reach the internet in the evening. The reason was that there had been a breakdown of the Seacom underwater cable somewhere in the Red Sea and all internet traffic in East Africa was affected.

During the day, we however managed to do quite a number of fact-finding exercises, again starting from simple ones and moving on to more complicated, such as the number of medals won by African athletes in the London Olympics of 2012 and to find out what were the main points of the Zambian economist Dambisa Moyo in her already famous book Dead Aid.

Here’s a summary by Zuhura Selemani about Day 4, and here’s another posting by Nurdin Selemani. They both say that they were impressed by the exercises which helped them improve the way they search for facts and backgrounds from the web.

Others explained how they learnt how to narrow the search by choosing the right search words and how to use some more advanced search options, such as narrowing the search by dates or language. Here’s the posting by Asia Khalfan, and here’s another commentary by Scholastica Mazula.

For the stories written about Dambisa Moyo, here are the links to the texts by Nurdin Selemani, Zuhura Selemani and Scholastica Mazula. For all other stories, see the links to participants’ blogs on the right.