How Internews Helps Journalists to Build Accuracy and Inclusiveness in News Reporting

By Elias Hakizimana.

Internews is an international organization that supports independent media in over 100 countries, from radio stations in refugee camps, to hyper-local news outlets, to individual activists and reporters.

The organization helps Journalists across the world to maintain accuracy, fact checking and inclusiveness in their daily reporting routines.

To know further about Internews and its works, The Inspirer’s Journalist held a conversation with Ms. Ida Jooste, Global Media Advisor at Internews during the recently concluded Women Deliver Conference in Kigali.

Ms. Ida Jooste explained that the main idea of Internews is to make sure that journalism is accurate, compelling and interest for people to read as well as changing perceptions in the world.

She said that the journey of Internews aims at boosting journalism proficiency and accuracy.

“One of the most things we do is to work with journalists to make sure that their stories are the best as they can be,” Ida Jooste said.

She advises journalists across the globe to use their powerful tool to change the society with the news.

“The President reads the news, taxi driver reads the news, the father reads the news, the mother reads the news, journalism is not an exclusive area, it is very inclusive, the stories must also be inclusive of interest and of meaning for all these people I mentioned,” she said.

Boosting Information Ecosystem

Ms. Ida Jooste said that Internews ensures relevancy for each country while assessing the needs of journalists to develop accurate and inclusive news reports.

“No single country is the same, one of the things we do to find out what is relevant to each country is ‘Information Ecosystem Assessment’ to learn if it is the problem of registration, capacity building for journalists, problem diversity of sources or if it is a problem of poor infrastructure. By doing such an assessment we make sure that what we do is relevant for that country.” She said.

She said that the interventions that are given in Kenya can be different from those in Uganda, Columbia and India.

The will of further collaboration and supports

“We are very pleased to meet and be in touch with journalists based in Rwanda, we have one staff who is based in Rwanda, but we do not have the projects here, but we can always have discussions and hear proposals of what people would like to do,” Ms. Ida Jooste said.

Internews has some plans ahead to continue supporting journalism across the world.

“There two very big plans; one is of becoming more diverse, whatever we do is under democracy and rights and governance, training the journalists is to ensure that they report on democracy, human rights and governance issues, health is important, environment and climate change are very important, so, governance and democracy is part of all our lives, we want to make sure that journalists who work for publications do their parts with their editors and with media owners to ensure that news is more diverse, not only politics.” Ida Jooste said.

Supporting media business models

“One of other plans is to do as much research as possible to understand what is happening to the funding models of media, we saw during Covid-19 and even before Covid-19 but especially during Covid-19, that so many media houses were not financially sustainable, the whole advertising revenue system has changed dramatically, we must do whatever we can to find out how what the best ways to plan for business models and make sure that we hold the hands of media partners around the world,” Ms. Ida Jooste said.

Support knowledge exchange

Ms. Ida Jooste believes that knowledge exchange is very positive for journalists working for different media outlets and social media platforms. She said that many more cross-border projects were established to boost knowledge exchange and capacity building of the journalists especially during Covid-19 pandemic.

“I think, in some ways because we shared so much in common around the globe during Covid-19, we shared knowledge with all actors at home, we shared everything and found ways of connecting one another, that is positive and so, that means that it is possible to be exposed to the ideas from another continent and from a neighbour from another context than before,” she said.

Internews works as a global connector of journalists. It established Health Journalism Network (HJN) to ensure accuracy and professional health news reporting at the global scale.

The huge responsibility

Ms. Ida Jooste recognizes the work of journalists as a professional in the career for years.

“Because I am a journalist, I understand what we go through, it is a very exciting job, but is very tiring and demanding job as well, so I really appreciate the work of journalists very much. One thing I encourage, which is to be accurate, to be there on behalf of our viewers, readers and listeners, it is a huge responsibility, so, it is to bring encouragement, and to be inspired by meeting other journalists.” She said.

Since around 40 years of operation, Internews has helped partners to reach millions of people with quality, local information that saves lives, improves livelihoods and holds institutions accountable.

theinspirerpublications@gmail.com