CLIENT: Media24

Journalists across South Africa are struggling to keep up. Over the last decade the tools of the trade have changed completely, but skills and newsroom processes haven’t caught up. Things are even worse in community media, where the money to retrain journalists isn’t as commonly available. 

 

To address this, Media24 reached out to frayintermedia to develop a curriculum that would help their community publications improve their skill at telling digital stories. 

 

We looked at the latest trends and tools on social media that had a proven business value for news organisations, and broke down the steps that journalists could take to publish high quality content and drive traffic to their websites. 

 

This course was rooted in QTCO unit standards, under which we are accredited, and we delivered multiple workshops to newsrooms across South Africa. 

 

Based off of the success of the training, Media24 requested specialised workshops, focussing on how journalists could work with free tools, cellphones, cameras and whatever they had available to produce multimedia stories. We developed dynamic curricula looking at how they could use free tools, and a workflow connecting cellphones to consumer level laptops, and trained journalists from Media24’s prestigious magazines division. 

 

Many of the journalists are now using the techniques we taught them to produce multimedia content, and we have tracked a notable improvement in how many of those newsrooms are telling digital stories and utilising social media.