By Ronke Sanya
So I stumbled upon this topic How to ‘attend’ international conferences without attending’ while reading the book The Journalist you ought to be, written by prolific journalist and my newly found mentor, Mr Otufodunrin. After reading this chapter I began to wonder if Nigerian journalists attend conferences at all. Do we even attend national conferences talk less of the international ones?
Media Conferences, trainings, workshops are a great opportunity to improve our knowledge. To budding journalists, it is an opportunity to nurture their journalistic ability while to veterans, it as an opportunity to refresh their knowledge.
However, the culture of attending conferences among Nigerian journalists is arguably poor. I have attended a few media conferences here in Lagos, aimed to improve reporting skills and career of journalists but the attendance was a huge disappointment.
Most Nigerian journalists are laid back when it comes to improving their skills and paying a price to acquire new expertise or knowledge. They believe in doing the same thing the same way, again and again. They hesitate when it comes to upping their game but don’t hesitate to scream out loud that journalists are paid peanuts at the slightest chance to lament.
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If we don’t hunger for more knowledge we cannot become that great journalists we desire to become. I have attended quite a number of conferences online just by monitoring the tweets and updates on social media. @Wij2017 is the most recent one I did and yes, it’s as good as being physically present. In this tech age when the world is at our fingertips, we have do not have excuse as to why we haven’t improved our reporting skills and content.
Many journalists fail to realize that the skills and knowledge they acquired years back are already dormant and irrelevant in recent years. Knowledge not improved upon is as good as a waste.
Apart from learning, networking, and sharing knowledge, attending media conferences is an eye opener that opens the mind of the journalist to new and unreported news. You see things in a better way and you are refreshed, reloaded and triggered to explore new stories.
To get daily updates about media conference, jobs, fellowships, awards and everything relating to media career, stay updated by reading mediacareerng.org and follow the social media handles. Twitter: mediacareerngr
