The Digital Space is a place for opportunities and acquiring new skills. In one of the Digital Skills Training initiated by the Women at Web project in partnership with Boresha Habari funded by USAID to 60 female journalists, a session on how one can make use of the digital tools available was conducted by Trainer Lilly Urio, a digital expert and director of HMT Media. During the session, trainees had the opportunity to understand how digital tools can help in cultivating a powerful news story through storytelling and data journalism.
Being able to use a variety of digital tools helps a female journalist, develop essential skills whether it is in production or writing, increases social interactivity, builds networks and provides learning opportunities. Let’s look at different digital tools that a female journalists can use in the space and the impact it has in the field of journalisms.
Social media tools, for instance Facebook, a platform connecting communities across countries, a journalist with a Facebook account can take an advantage of creating a Facebook group and use the space as a place of cultivating local news, by doing so it helps in building communities especially on a local level, LinkedIn a platform that helps journalists in nurturing and furthering their careers professionally as they get to interact and network with across the globe and Twitter can be used for the purpose of writing news in brief and sharing it to the public.
Second tool is medium, a platform where a journalist can use to write stories and share them based on different thematic topics with features that help in creating a powerful story, through the platform a journalist can use it as a means of income also networking with their readers while learning from other medium writers through their shared publications.
Third, Canva, a graphic designing platform for a journalist with an interest in learning about graphic designing, this can be their stepping stone. From designing posters, presentation, documents and the rest of the visual content Canva provides all that, it has free templates that a journalist can use in telling stories.
Fourth, Podcast, is an online radio where the listener can tune in to listen, since the world has gone digital and most of the time people are on their smart phones it is quite rare to see a person listening to a radio, with that in mind a journalist can take the opportunity to have a program that speaks about political issues, a journalist can choose to always host it or from time to time to have guest speakers on the program.
Fifth, Google products provides a journalist with free unlimited space for uploading news in video formats via you tube, publishing news via google news, a journalist can also use google slides as a way of creating and designing a presentation that he or she see fits based on a thematic area of their choice be it current political stats in the country or the economic situation in rural and urban areas.
This is why the Women at Web project powered by Tech & Media Convergency in partnership with Boresha Habari funded by USAID, hopes to nurture a bigger group of female journalists interested in using digital tools and understanding the need of embracing their digital skills so as to improve content through digital story telling with stories of impact to their societies.