Islamabad, 5 November 2017: Media Matters for Democracy under its initiative #MediaForTransparency completed a series of extensive data journalism training programs designed specifically for Pakistani journalists.
#MediaForTransparency is an MMFD initiative that seeks to incorporate and demonstrate the use of Right to information, and data and investigative journalism. The program seeks to simultaneously work with mainstream journalists to build on their knowledge base and to generate investigative stories, and develop supporting tools to assist journalists in the production of their own stories.
Under this program, we brought together 45 journalists from five cities for a 3-day course ‘Fundamentals of Data Journalism’ aimed at introducing the basic of data and investigative journalism and data analysis techniques. More than 200 journalists from both the mainstream news outlets and freelancers applied for the program but owing to the limited number of seats only 11 were selected from each city.
‘Fundamentals of Data Journalism’ is a course specially designed for Pakistani journalists, keeping the local challenges in mind, and in addition to data journalism concepts, tools, and techniques, also addresses the use of Right to Information, visualisation, and data analysis methods.
In the second phase, select journalists from each city group will be engaged for a data 5-day boot-camp to be hosted in December 2017.