Reflections from the first training day

Participants of the investigative internet training have made postings on what we did on Wednesday and how they felt about the first day’s training.

Ratifa Baranyikwa, news editor at Tanzania Daima, says that the course has been engaging and has helped to broaden her knowledge to find hidden information from the web for her journalistic research. Some clues she mentions are to use the right search words, to follow links and try to find the original sources.

Erick Mchome from The Citizen says that he likes that the course is "intensive and hands-on”. He mentions as an example of new things he learned the narrowing of a Google search for web pages from the past week only, from the past month, the last year, or reducing the search material for specific dates.

Agnes Shija, journalism lecturer at Tumaini University Dar es Salaam College, has written a compact summary of first training day. She also says she enjoys the attitude in the class of sharing knowledge and experiences, also among the participants.

For another comprehensive review of the events on Day 1, see the posting by Simon Berege, head of journalism department at Tumaini University Iringa College. He produces a full report about the many definitions of what is investigative journalism, and what is investigative internet journalism. He also lists a number of search tips, such as “think first, before you search”.

Timothy Kitundu, senior business reporter from The Express, has also prepared a detailed summary of the first day, explaining the main points of the speech delivered by Jussi Nummelin from the Finnish Embassy. Kitundu says that he learned that investigative internet journalism “is a vital working tool especially when seeking information from adamant and bureaucratic sources”. In his opinion, the most important point from yesterday was however this: Spend much more time on the investigation than on the actual writing of the story.