Media Newsletter – 8 November

Meet the youngest journalist ever to bag the prestigious 2022 BBC News Komla Dumor Award.

1. Journalism trends to watch: Adopting artificial intelligence (AI) is certainly worth considering in your work and newsrooms today. Here's why: as a range of technologies that are human-designed to automate, accelerate or extend human work in specific tasks, AI can free up journalists to create better reporting, according to a London School of Economics and Political Science report. It can be useful for long-form articles and in-depth analyses, content recommendations, newsroom automation and alerts about newsworthy trends in big data. Even better, African governments are on board with AI adoption in their media, evident in a recent UNESCO survey  establishing the priorities and capacity-building needs concerning AI in 32 African countries. These governments are all for prioritising the leverage of AI for digital transformation, newsmaking, communications and more access to information. 

2. Who’s funding: Good news for freelance journalists based anywhere in Africa. The Freelance Investigative Reporters and Editors (FIRE) Virtual Newsroom program is offering grants for up to $12,500 to reporters who want to investigate a hot issue in their country or community. It comes with open-records coaching, referrals to pro bono legal assistance, trained research assistance, data entry and fact-checking and story editing. Deadline: Rolling.  Apply.

3. Training opportunity: Are you looking to develop your craft and gain skills and knowledge that take you to the next stage of your career? StoryLab Academy is designed specifically for you, providing over 15 free training courses for African journalists, on data journalism, investigative reporting, solutions journalism, geo-journalism, and reporting on human trafficking, among others. Find courses.

4. In the spotlight: 25-year-old Zambian journalist Dingindaba Jonah Buyoya became the youngest and first southern African journalist to bag the 2022 BBC News Komla Dumor Award. Created in honour of a Ghanaian journalist, the award is given annually to a reporter with exceptional talent in telling African stories. Buyoya will spend three months at the BBC working with News teams in London. He is currently a TV host and reporter with Diamond Television in Lusaka, Zambia. Congratulations!

5. Stories that moved us: Meet the 19-year-old Kenyan student who is building robotic dogs to keep soldiers safe. David Laurence Kamau was barely a teenager when Kenya experienced some of its worst terrorist attacks. Gutted by images he saw and news stories he read, he decided to boost his country’s security by doing what he knows best: building robots. And now he’s building a robotic military dog that will be able to detect, disarm and detonate explosives using artificial intelligence.  Read more.

Curated by Glory Mafor.

Do you want to boost your journalism with hot skills like multimedia production and finding unique stories that are undertold? The African Stories: A guide for journalists on how to tell better stories about Africa course is for you. It’s free, digital and only takes three hours to complete.  Register here.