In the next one month, the Media Foundation for West Africa (MFWA) will roll out a series of story development bootcamps for journalists across Ghana. The five-day residential story development bootcamps will involve interactive training sessions between seasoned journalists and editors and young career reporters. The sessions will be delivered through group works and practical story development sessions.
Starting with the Accra cohort at the Hephzibah Christian Centre in Aburi from February 14 – 18, the bootcamp will bring together early-to-mid career journalists from across print, radio, television, and online news portals to discuss story ideas, brainstorm on story pitches and eventually shape the ideas into compelling narratives. The bootcamp will also run the same week in Tamale at the Modern City hotel and in Kumasi the following week at the Miklin hotel.
The residential story development bootcamps will provide the participating journalists avenues to share ideas and experiences while learning the best approaches to developing ideas into impactful stories.
In 2021, more than seventy (70) journalists from across Ghana, Cote d’Ivoire, and Niger benefitted from these bootcamps. The training sessions last year focused on empowering journalists to obtain the requisite skills in using Access to Information ATI laws to do quality and factual reporting. In line with the project’s objectives, the beneficiary journalists were able to use the ATI laws of their respective countries to secure information to produce compelling stories that generated massive public interest and, in many cases, a response from the authorities.
The five-day residential story development bootcamp for journalists forms part of the MFWA’s project on Enhancing Citizens Access to Information and Participation in Governance in selected districts across Ghana. It is being implemented with funding support from the DW Akademie based in Germany.
