The Centre for Journalism Innovation Development, CJID, Abuja has organized a maiden edition of a conference tagged West African Journalism Innovation Conference, WAJIC’23 with the theme: “Accountability Journalism: Nurturing Innovation for a Sustainable Future held at Abuja Continental Hotel.
Participants of the maiden edition of the conference are Media professionals, practicing journalists, academia, policymakers, and media rights groups, and Campus Journalists.
Addressing participants cut across West Africa, Dapo Olorunyomi, Chief Executive Officer of Centre for Journalism Innovation Development, CJID, and Publisher Premium Times explained that democracy cannot survive without journalism and that technology is a tool for the sustainability of the current state of journalism in West Africa.
He noted that Innovation is another way of addressing journalism problems such as physical and psychosocial safety due nonregular payment of salaries by some media organizations.
Contributing, the Board Chairman of the organization, Prof. Umaru Pate who is also the Vice Chancellor of Federal University, Kashere, Gombe state made this known during its commitment to transforming the practice of journalism across the West African region.
He challenged media practitioners in the West African region to come out with innovations that would sustain them in the global trend.
“The future of journalism is in audio, video, and tapes, and charged the practitioners to innovate in technology for them to meet the changing needs of audiences at different levels, journalists should out with ideas that can enable them to survive in the new world of digitalization,” he said.
Prof. Pate then advised Journalists to adapt to the five guiding principles to enable them to succeed,” to reach out, be relevant to communities, earn a reputation for what you do, be resilient and raise revenue for the organization”.
The Vice President of Google (News), Richard Gingras who delivered the keynote address, said “There are many language models, stressing that the scale and complexity of the information space will expand further with machine learning and generative language models.
Gingras challenged media practitioners to develop better models to generate constructive content which is important.
In his goodwill message, the Africa Director of MacArthur Foundation, Dr. Kole Shettima reiterated the commitment of MacArthur to continue to support media organizations in Nigeria, to promote accountability journalism.
Dr. Shettima explained that accountability journalism can only be possible when the media is independent and works without fear, intimidation, or manipulation.
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