Pulitzer Center accepting proposals for data journalism on property rights [Worldwide]

Journalists worldwide can apply for a grant. The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting is accepting project proposals for data-driven journalism projects related to land rights and property rights. 
The program is particularly interested in data-driven stories that use satellite imagery, 360° videos, drones, sensors, data visualizations or interactive maps/graphics.
Possible topics include land tenure, indigenous land rights, transparency in land transactions and concessions, resource rights or overlapping land use rights.
Three to five proposals will be selected to receive a grant. 
The deadline is May 31.
For more information on how to apply, click here.

Free training on Community journalism workshops available [Brazil]

São Paulo residents ages 16 to 25 can apply for free training.
The project Você Repórter da Periferia, led by blog Desenrola E Não Me Enrola, offers community journalism workshops and programs in the São Paulo metro area.
The workshops focus on web journalism, writing for social networking, video reporting, photojournalism and video shooting and editing. There are 40 spots available.
Participants will be able to produce stories in the second phase of the program. The activities will be held on weekends from June to December.
The deadline is May 22.
For more information on how to apply (in Portuguese), click here.

Postdoctoral fellowship program for journalists open [MENA]

Media scholars who graduated from a Ph.D. program in the past three years can apply for a fellowship program.
The Arab Council for the Social Sciences (ACSS) is offering a one-year fellowship to junior scholars in social sciences, including journalism and media studies. 
Candidates must be citizens or nationals of an Arab country and show high-quality academic credentials.
Fellows will receive living expenses, research expenses and additional travel funding.
The deadline is June 15.
For more information on how to apply (in Arabic), click here.

Tencent seeks application for the post of Video content associate [China]

Videomakers fluent in English and Mandarin can apply for this position.
Tencent is hiring a video content associate in Hong Kong.
Responsibilities include producing video storyboard and broadcast content, assisting with video production on long- and short-form videos, and helping discover content for international audiences.
Candidates must have at least one year of experience and a bachelor's degree in film, media communication, music or similar. 
For for information on how to apply, click here.

Power of the media in the internet age


BEING A KEYNOTE ADDRESS BY TAIWO OBE AT THE LAUNCH OF THE NIGERIAN JOURNALIST INTERNET RIGHTS INITIATIVE (NJIRI) AT THE INTERNATIONAL PRESS CENTRE, OGBA, LAGOS, NIGERIA, ON WEDNESDAY, 2 MAY 2018.
It is a privilege and honour to be here today among friends and colleagues to present this keynote address. I am grateful to the International Press Centre (IPC), Lagos, for the kind consideration.
I want to believe that I was accorded this honour because of some of our contributions toward making Nigerian journalists digital-compliant.
In February 2014, under the aegis of the EverythingJournalism Group which I created on LinkedIn, and The Journalism Clinic, my outfit, which vision is to raise the next generation of first-rate journalists, I convened, first in Lagos, the Summit on Functional Social Networking for Nigerian Journalists, with the kind sponsorship of the UBA Group. We had variations of this summit in Abuja and Port-Harcourt. Tive Denedo, a former colleague at The Guardian, helped to capture the essence of the summit:  “to engage, discuss and hold a conversation about the convergence of traditional and social media and how the experience and years of deployment of the former can help design a pathway of value for the latter.”
But, when I want to be down to earth, I say that our journalists are still waiting for buses at a bus stop which had been physically removed, and buses no longer stopped there.
I had observed that, while others were taking advantage of the ubiquitous smartphone and access to the internet to reach out to vast audiences, journalists were content to remain stuck in the “traditional media” web while whining over inconsequential such as how bloggers were “desecrating the profession.” Whatever that meant.
The fact was that, right before our eyes, media consumption habits were changing but what did we care? People no longer waited till the following morning to read the news. With the social media, news became like instant noodles; to be consumed, as it happened, sizzling hot and fresh, and digested through engaging conversations.  When one-ime Nigerian Vice President Atiku Abubakar joined Twitter, he noted that “social media is where young people, the bulk of Nigeria’s population, gather to share their thoughts, often venting their frustrations with the inefficiencies of the country.” But did we listen?
At that summit, my plea was simple: “…we should begin to think less of whether we are a print or electronic medium, but more of creating content that will attract and engage audiences on all devices that technology has spurned.”
In the version of the summit which we held at Abuja, tagged The Capital Edition, I had asked Olusegun Adeniyi, the ThisDay editorial board chairman, to speak on “Why I am a digital alien” because I knew he was absent from the social media. He accepted my challenge. In his presentation, believe it, he allowed that the social media “had become a potent tool in the age of information,” yet he had two reasons for staying away. Permit me to quote him, extensively: “There are two reasons why I am out. The first one is general while the second is specific. As to the general one, it all started from a realisation that I was spending considerable time reading and replying emails and text messages. So, I saw no point in further complicating my life. I have always believed that if anybody needed to reach me, he would get my email (which is readily available for readers of THISDAY newspaper) and send me a direct mail to which I would reply, and I am very good at that.
Now to the specific: I saw very early the pitfalls in engaging people you may not even know in virtual discussions.
As far back as year 2001, because my email address was on my Backpage column in THISDAY, I began to receive several group mails. There was hardly any listserv cobbled together by Nigerians of my generation that would not include my email address. And even when I rarely participated in their discussions, I followed most of their threads….But right from year 2001, I saw the danger in virtual friendship from what transpired on some of these listserv. Many of these internet friends would begin by eulogising one another, just on account of some posts on which they agree until a day when someone writes something they do not agree with. The disagreement could even begin in an innocent manner but one word out of turn and it would degenerate into serious verbal wars and hate speeches, sometimes even threats of violence.
It was about this time that Facebook was launched and then the Paris Hilton of this world started telling us what they ate for breakfast, where they went in the afternoon and who they were sleeping with at night. And I asked myself: why should that be my business. I saw what people were doing on Facebook, and I decided I was not going to join. And I never did.
For sure, the social media is good and because of the pressure from several friends, I have been tempted to join Twitter. I have been considering the offer in the last six months and will decide one way or the another before the end of the year….”
Mr Adeniyi spoke on 25 June 2014. He didn’t join Twitter by the end of that year as he had hoped, but he did in 2015, on 27 April. He, however, didn’t post his first tweet until 29 April, to a warm welcome from his adherents, many of whom wondered why it took him so long to join the platform. He didn’t respond to any of the comments. I had asked him, what eventually triggered his joining Twitter. His response was that he convinced himself that it would “enhance” his job. Would his appearance on 1 May 2015, on The Platform, a yearly knowledge-sharing programme by a new generation church to discuss national issues, have been the final straw? Anyhow, with at least 23,600 followers on Twitter, there is no doubt that he had for long denied himself a veritable platform for social conversations on his writings but also to expand his readership in multiples of thousands. “I am enjoying it all,” he told me when I asked him how he now felt. He joined Facebook on that same 29 April 2015, but that was it; no activity since then.
Let’s stay a bit more on Twitter, where so many people around the world now hanout for breaking news.
Once upon a time, all you could tweet was 140-character long. Then Twitter doubled the space. Now, you can compose ad infinitum in what is more commonly as the Thread. This was introduced by Twitter on 12 December 2017. Twitter has now made it easy to thread by adding a plus sign at the bottom right of the window where you compose a tweet, and you can add frames upon frames until you are through with your essay. My dear friends, you can now “publish” your own newspaper or whatever you want on that platform.
I don’t know how many here have heard of, or follow, Seth Abramson. For the uninitiated, he is an attorney, trained as a criminal investigator, tenure-track professor of Communication Arts and Sciences at the University of New Hampshire, USA, and since the coming of Donald Trump, a regular commentator/analyst on CNN and BBC. His Twitter handle is like a village square. He is a master of threads. On The Journalism Clinic page on Facebook, I highlighted a 17 February thread he did on Yulya Alferova – ex-wife of Russian oligarch Artem Klyushin and a member of Trump’s entourage in Moscow in 2013. That thread comprises 20 frames including images in almost all of them. The last time I checked, that thread had 3,591 Retweets and 6,192 Likes. That, in one word, is engagement. The interesting part of Abramson’s TL is the Donate button. “Being an independent journalist,” he notes, “is a time-consuming work, however, I don’t use Patreon or any other formal donation platform, so I appreciate it more than I can say when readers enjoy what I write enough to want to contribute to my research and writing. Any amount is welcome; knowing my work has value to its audience helps keep me going. So, if you enjoy my contributions on Twitter and other sites and would like to see more of them, please click the PayPal link below. PayPal is quick, easy and 100% secure. My sincere thanks for your generosity!” If you have not yet experienced the storm that Abramson’s threads generate, I will urge you to spare a little time to check it out. Many swear by it: one commenter posted on one of his recent threads, #InSethWeTrust. Abramson says of his Twitter feed: “(It) is what’s called ‘metajournalism’ – a metamodern form of post-internet digital journalism that acknowledges that we all have too much information to process daily. Instead of despairing, however, metajournalism tries to find a way to see and use all available information to make better journalism. How does matajournalism do this? By seeing and using the entire field of information on a given subject - say the Trump-Russia investigation – whether the information comes from the United States or elsewhere, from media outlets or digital outlets, from a verified Twitter account or a New York Times article from a decade ago. The idea is that, as long as all of the information that is seen by the metajournalist is accurate, it can be used to reconstruct false narratives into accurate ones.”
Back home, I will recommend you check out the Twitter feed of Nairametrics which proclaims itself as “the most reliable source for information online. Creating wealth through information.” It is not an empty boast. But, why I am highlighting it here is for its regularly Pinned Tweet - Corporate New Roundup, which is a Thread of significant business and economy news of the week, with a sprinkle of insights and informed commentary. It is a Sponsored thread. Know-how pays, particularly when there is also a captive audience. Nairametrics has 14.7k followers.
I am going to round off with a quote from one of a few informed commentators I respect and follow: Simbo Olorunfemi. He dominates the Facebook space with his well-researched posts – talk about know-how again. In a post on 29 April titled “Not Too Young To Thrive” he stated: “…the internet is a massive gift, a major game-changer. Use it. Maximise It.”
Perhaps Hal Varian, the founding dean of the School of Information at the University of Berkely, California, puts it better, even if it has a plug-in for Google (where he is chief economist): “The Internet makes information available. Google makes information accessible.”
Have know-how. Have access to the internet. Have power.
OBE, Commonwealth Profession Fellow and Fellow of the Nigerian Guild of Editors, is founder/director of The Journalism Clinic.
TL: @araisokun/@Clinic4Journos