RAISING JOURNALIST FOR ENVIRONMENT

Journalism at a Glance

Journalism is quite an interesting field that is taking over the youth job market at a very high rate. With media houses out looking for news coverage updates at every corner of the nation and world in real time, is enabling journalist at given exclusive location, covering specific news features, a higher ground in this competitive market.

Challenging Perceptions

One of the uncovered areas of journalism, mostly in the African setup is in the field of environment. The public (media houses and their audience) perceive environmental news as the ordinary weather forecast reports done in brief, several times in a day after the main news.

The Environment is basicaly our natural  surrounding | Environmental journalism  is basically reporting changes brought about human’s past and current interaction with the natural environment

The Environment is our natural surrounding and how we relate to it in our everyday activities creates change. This ‘relationship’ with the environment is what make relevant news and information, that needs to be shared on real time basis. Environment is interrelated with various aspect of our day today livelihoods. For example, pollution from the cars we drive everyday, the dumping of unwanted waste materials in the sea and oceans, desertification through trees we have cut down for firewood, climate change and its effects on agriculture leading to hunger among others. All this interrelated dots make up Environmental News.

Reporting on Environment 

Unlike most current events, environmental news issues and scenes may at-times unfold gradually. This is what has made most journalist not to specialize in the environmental news field. Rather most journalist opt to report news on politics that come ‘hot’ on everyday headlines, thus leaving a gap in the environmental news coverage. The fact that environmental news needs investigative coverage, use of past and current facts to produce a feature or a documentary, most journalist tend to shy away from that line.

Personally, I find environmental journalism a fascinatingly favorable field to venture and report on, through production of documentaries and news features.

Environmental journalism is like covering as story in its current state of events through relating and uncovering a cold case that has been silent all along and drawing a scientific trend or conclusion. When you establish the connection, the story comes to life in a brilliantly  spectacular manner

 

Cultivating Freelance Environmental Journalist

Personally, I think that the greatest challenge facing environmental journalism in Africa is the lack adequate tools and knowledge to gather and report environments stories in a more interest manner for the audience. The audience today is rather unaware of the gradual environmental changes taking place around them  unless it is a headline story of an environmental disaster.

Africa needs to cultivate specialized environmental journalist who can uncover and report environmental news through relating with past environmental events and changes. Then they will be empowered to produce creative, captivating and informative headline news from  factual data and real-time environment occurrences.

Jonathan- Green Plus