Narrowing the search to find what we need

The participants have posted their summaries about what we did yesterday and what they thought was most useful for them.

Grace Ruhinda, radio presenter and subeditor at Triple ‘A’ FM, explains how she did her story on the family of Lupita Nyong’o. First she made a search about simply Lupita Nyong’o, and then she searched for more information about her family. Thereafter, she went on to find some more key points from various online resources and made notes into her notebook. Then she drafted the story and finally did a few edits before publishing the story in her blog. “It was a very tricky task, but I learned a lot working on this particular story,” she says.

Marko Gideon, communication officer at World Wide Fund for Nature and also trans-editor of IPS, has written a complete summary of almost everything we did on Day 2. He also explains step by step how he searched for information for his story on president Museveni’s remarks that he would rather work with Russians than Americans, though the USA has already for long been considered as Uganda’s closest supporter and ally. From the U.S. State Department website, Marko found lots of comments by U.S. officials and human rights organizations against Museveni’s decision to sign into law the anti-homosexuality bill. He also found material about Russia’s new law against the propagation of so called non-traditional sexual relations. “So I discovered that Museveni’s utterance might have come because Russia is also an anti-gay state,” he concludes.

Rotlinde Achimpota, subeditor at Mambo Jambo FM, lists some of the research assignments we have done, starting with the easier ones about names of presidents and heights of mountains, and moving on to more advanced ones about the current inflation rate in Tanzania, or to find direct quotations of president Kikwete published in the local media the previous week. She says she has learnt during the training that research via the internet is very useful to her in her work at her radio station and in the future she will research her stories more deeply than before.

Elisha Mayallah, senior journalist at Arusha Times, was most impressed to learn how to narrow his web search by timeline, language or country, in order to optimize his search results.

Zulfa Musa, reporter of the national newspaper Mwananchi, says that even though she has been using the internet for more than five years, it is only now that she has really learnt to find from the web exactly the information that she needs. “After this training, I will improve my stories,” she says.

Ramadhani Siwayombe, correspondent of the national newspaper Tanzania Daima, says that this training has made him a new journalist and a professional of internet. Congratulations for that!