Media houses urged to prioritise staff training for improved content

By Chinyere Anyanwu

Media organisations in Nigeria have been tasked with the need to prioritise training for their staff to better equip them for journalism practice in the current digital age.

The appeal was made at the weekend during a one-day capacity training programme tagged, “Precision and Digital Journalism,” organised by the Nigeria Union of Journalists, Lagos Council.

The Resource Person, Mr. Lekan Otufodunrin, who took the participants through a deep session of training said: “Newsrooms need to reinvent their staffing so that they can produce better content for their audience.”

Otufodunrin, while commending the NUJ Lagos Council for taking the laudable step of training its members, described precision or data journalism as the process of using data to tell stories for better understanding of the audience.

He noted that, “precision or data journalism is data-based. It is evidence-based. We are in an age of misinformation when too many things cannot be verified; when many people come online and make claims they cannot back up and when people destroy people for no just cause. So, this is a time when we need more evidence-based reporting. We should ask people, where is the number? Where is the figure? How can you prove it?”

Stressing the importance of staff training, he stated that, “When people don’t get better, they will remain mediocre but when they are trained, they will improve the quality of the work the organisation is doing.”

Earlier in his welcome address, the Chairman, NUJ, Lagos Council, Mr. Adeleye Ajayi, appreciated the trainer for volunteering to take the selected journalists through the course. He urged the participants to take the training seriously to enable them to comprehend and be able to put the acquired knowledge into practice in their various newsrooms.