Some of Bangalore’s citizen journalists met up with us for the first time to discuss story ideas about various city’s issues they feel passionate about. They came from varied backgrounds viz. software engineering, human resources, research among others. More details about them can be found here.
As a part of the mentoring process and to aid them with writing techniques, we conducted a small webinar where we discussed different types of story types with them. Some of the story types included a news story, a feature story, an interview, a listicle, an opinion piece, a data story among others. The webinar also got into explaining the citizen journalists the basic tenets of journalism including accuracy of the report, awareness of personal biases and putting faces to data-related trends.
The citizen journalists also got an understanding of how to figure if a certain kind of story is important and the different ways of finding it out. It then went on to explore the structure of a story, and different types of leads.
All this has been done as a part of Australia India Council Grants, where these citizen journalists will receive constant mentoring by Co Media lab and will contribute to a series of stories on issues that they are passionate about. We are now excited to read more stories done by them.