We have today moved on to real fact-finding and producing stories based on the investigations. Already on Wednesday, we started with a warm-up of some more simple research in order to activate our brains and minds to the more challenging research.
To find out the population of Iringa town, the phone number of Tanzania National Parks and the street address of the Embassy of Finland in Dar es Salaam were yet easy tasks. Populations, geographical and political details and such can usually be found in a Wikipedia article that you would reach just by searching for the name of the place or country. Links to contact information are usually found on the top of the website in the right end of the page, or in a column on the left side of the page, or at the bottom of the page.
So far easy was also to find out who is the current president of Mali, even though the previous one was quite recently toppled. The task to find out who is the president of Sweden was however a bit more difficult as the country is a monarchy and has a king – with no political power though. The prime minister is the head of the government.
As Tanzanians usually love English football, one search was to find out who is the top goal scorer of the English Premier League at the moment.
Some other assignments were a bit more challenging for a warm-up, like what president Jakaya Kikwete actually said during his speech at the conference of the women’s league of the ruling CCM party in Dodoma last weekend. The direct quotes of the president were finally found by narrowing the search to the last week only, by choosing search results in Kiswahili, and excluding from the search the local blogs, which are popular but usually publish just photos.
Today the participants have been searching for information about Ezekiel Kemboi, the Kenyan Olympic gold medal runner in the 3,000 metres steeplechase, and why he has been in the news this week. Stories were written and links provided to the original sources.
The recently buried court case of Kemboi and a young lady called Anne Njeri Otieno is all about sex, celebrity and violence – as well as differing opinions and unanswered questions. For more details, see the stories produced by the training participants. Here’s the story by Ratifa Baranyikwa, here’s Erick Mchome’s text, and here you can find Masembe Tambwe’s narrative. Njonjo Mfaume, journalism lecturer at the University of Dar es Salaam, has also compiled a pretty balanced commentary – with a very interesting link to an article published in the Kenyan newspaper The Star, usually well-known for its more sensational reporting.
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