By Seye Joseph @seyetweets
Sunday Editor of Punch Newspapers, Ms. Toyosi Ogunseye has advised journalists to utilise training opportunities for networking with colleagues and build lasting working relationships.
Ogunseye gave the advice in her keynote address at the Cocktail launch of the Bloomberg Media Initiative Africa Executive Training Program in Lagos on April 11.
Beyond the certificates to be awarded at the training, Ogunseye urged the participants to meet new people and foster effective partnership for the development of their career .
“Don’t see this training as one of this event where you just come and mark register. You must see it as an avenue to create networks to build a formidable team that can for example start your own business news platform for the development of the profession and the society at large,” she said.
According to her, the main purpose of journalism is to hold people in authority accountable and build a society that is free of corruption.
“The world will be a jungle if there is no journalist,” she said.
She urged the participants to always see business side in every story, noting that “financial journalism is every day journalism which impacts on every facet of life.”
Also speaking at the launch, the Chair of the Department of Mass Communication, University of Lagos, Prof. Ralph Akinfeleye urged the participants to see the program as an opportunity to learn new ways of plasticising the profession.
He said that the program is an initiative sponsored by Bloomberg Philanthropies with support from Ford Foundation under the consortium of University of Pretoria, Rhodes University, University of Nairobi, Strathmore Business School, University of Lagos and Lagos Business School.
“This is a great moment of opportunities for us in Africa and participants must be take advantage of it to train themselves in especially how to generate useful data,” Akinfeleye said.