UCJ-UI Trains Campus Journalists in AFAS

Oluwatosin Adeoye

The Union of Campus Journalists, University of Ibadan held training for campus journalists in the Faculty of Art under the leadership of the Association of Faculty of Arts (AFAS) Press Organisation on Thursday 18th July 2024.

The training session had three segments; News Writing & Reporting, Features Writing, and Investigative Journalism handled by Emmanuel Utibe, Tolulope Ayeye, and Ayodele Aduwo respectively.

The training which lasted for two (2) hours had the trainers doing justice to the topics or focuses. Speaking on News Writing Emmanuel Utibe laid the foundation that the 5W’s and one H are essential in every news story, especially the lead which is the summary of the story based on the inverted pyramid structure.

Tolulope Ayeye explained that Features is an extensive article that should be written in a storytelling format to hold the readers’ attention due to its length and detailed format. In her words “Features gives you the freedom to explore a story from various angles” advising the participants of the training to be careful in the way they engage anonymity, not every voice in a story should be anonymous, and “you should discard any respondent whose account without proper reference will downplay the authenticity of your story”.

Ayodele Aduwo speaking on Investigative Journalism asserted that investigative journalism has somewhat been a scarce commodity among campus journalists’ publications at the University of Ibadan, hence, he encouraged campus journalists to wake up to their duties of researching into dark spots to reveal images behind certain shadows.

According to Aduwo “journalists write for social justice” adding that if a journalist intends to write an investigative piece, such an individual should possess the feature writing skill because an investigative piece is written in a feature story format with unraveling evidence-based content.