Grassroot and Health-e News partner up to train citizen journalists
In a world where newsrooms have to make do with less and less, resulting in more and more issues going uncovered, it’s local issues in marginal areas which are most likely to be unreported on.
That’s why Grassroot, a South African organisation which provides tools to assist community-driven organisation and campaigning, has built LiveWire, a platform to help citizen journalists to tell their own stories. By providing an outlet and newswire service for traditional media, LiveWire also helps to bring attention from professional journalists to issues that might otherwise be ignored.
Now, LiveWire has teamed up with one of the country’s foremost proponents of citizen journalism, Health-e News. Together, the two organisations co-hosted the first of many training programs for Grassroot users, to help improve the quality of the content they generate and equip community leaders with the skills necessary to break developing stories.
About a dozen community leaders from across Soweto attended the session, which was led by Health-e News’ news editor, Gill Gifford and project manager, Masutane Modjadji.
Health-e News is South Africa’s award-winning television and print health news service. It has been producing news and in-depth analysis for national media since 1999 with television, online and print clients and has a nationwide network of citizen journalists, OurHealth, who provide reporting from clinics in rural villages and small towns throughout the country.
The training focussed on journalism basics — how to identify what a story is, the types of stories we report on, and the ethics of reporting.
Grassroot is looking to recruit more community leaders to be part of the LiveWire program, and see them actively pursue stories in their respective communities, similar to the OurHealth program.
The power of citizen reporting is becoming recognised in South Africa. It was one of the Health-e News citizen journalists who broke the story of over 100 mentally ill patients that were removed from Life Esidimeni, resulting in their death, which led to a national outcry and the resignation of Gauteng’s MEC for Health, Qedani Mahlangu.
LiveWire, meanwhile, most recently broke news on the Kliptown protest which was featured on eNCA’s investigate show, Checkpoint. It is also available on the eNCA website and was shared with it’s 1.3 million twitter followers.
