Select journalists across the country last week, received training on how to develop creative news content to expand their audience footprints.
The training organised by telecommunications service provider, 9mobile, sought to encourage participants to leverage on the use of video contents and other innovative ways to scale their reporting skills.
The telecom company made this known during the 6th edition of its Media Capacity Building Workshop with the theme “leveraging video content to reach new audiences”.
Speaking during the session, the Executive Director, Regulatory and Corporate Affairs, 9mobile, Abdulrahman Ado, noted that with the advent and growth of citizen journalism fueled by digital technology, it has become imperative for journalists to build digital reporting skills.
Ado who was represented by the Public Relations Lead, 9mobile, Chineze Amanfo, said it was extremely important for Journalists to be in tune with latest trends that will help them attract wider news consuming audiences to their contents.
“At 9mobile, we appreciate the efforts by journalists in ensuring that members of the public constantly get up to date information about happenings within and around the country. This training became necessary to help our media partners gain new insights on content leveraging that guarantees quality media traction.”
Facilitator of the session and renowned digital content creator, Tobi Ayeni (MissTechy), stressed that it was vital for journalists to also see themselves as content creators whose role it is to keep the consumer/audience in focus during the entire process of content creation.
She emphasized that video contents offer a better chance of attracting new audiences.
Backing up her claims, she highlighted that, “45 percent of people watch more than an hour of Facebook or YouTube videos a week, while 72 hours of videos are uploaded to YouTube every 60 seconds and 92 percent of mobile video viewers share videos with others.”
Consequently, Ayeni noted that based on the statistics available, video content is unique and attracts more engagement which is important for publishers seeking to appeal to wider audiences and gain loyalty.
She identified various video types as including live action video, talking head videos, interview videos and animated/text overlay videos, which can all be used specifically, depending on what the content creator is seeking to achieve.
