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Journalism is changing and it's changing very fast.
And because of social media, new media, digital media storytelling,
especially the social media storytelling, when you talk about people
who tell stories on Twitter, on Facebook, you know using their text
messages and all that. These new storytellers that we didn't have
a few years ago are breaking news faster and sometimes or often
actually better than journalists can do because sometimes they will
be where the story is happening, when it's happening.
So by the time a journalist arrives there, the story has moved.
And somebody has told the story already.
So we think that journalism has to change, has to begin to
adapt to all these changes that are happening.
Over the last few years in Kenya, we've done a lot of innovation
in journalism and Internews, globally, is a very innovative
organization and what we do is to think about how is
storytelling changing, and how should we continue to
lead the thinking in journalism and better the standards
of storytelling around the world.
We've also adopted in a big way, and it's not new anyway,
long-form storytelling as something we want to do very well.
Producing documentaries, producing long features --
print, radio and all. And to look at those as these stories that
of course will not be told by your average storytellers in the streets.
But actually stories that we can also use to engage those
average storytellers in a new form that we are now calling,
"the long and short of it" at Internews.
Is we work with journalists who package these stories, long-form
stories, and then we narrow cast these stories to an audience
that actually engages with those stories by writing back,
by tweeting, by storytelling around those stories.
So it's combining the long form with the short form that now
audiences can do and we actually narrow cast them in the
communities where those stories were produced.
The Kenyan government last year released volumes of data
that were not public. It became the first government in Africa to
release data, public data. And what that meant -- we thought that
journalism must begin to engage with that data. Because over the
years, journalists in Kenya have talked about the government not
being very good in releasing information. And here was the
government releasing the data and the journalists were not using
it at all. So began to think about, how can we do data storytelling
and we were able to talk to a number of people.
One of the first things we noticed is of course we needed more
expertise in crunching the numbers, in working with the databases.
And that is how I began to look around for somebody who can
help us do that, to do something more intensive. The first training
in Nairobi, which was the first data storytelling training ever in
Kenya and in much of Africa. We did it in October last year.
And this year we thought, we want to take this a step further.
We want to make it deeper. And how we did the first one --
we brought together journalists -- these are experienced
journalists in Kenya -- to do this course, to really get the
skills of data storytelling.