Five Lessons from the African Story Challenge Bootcamp in Morocco

By: Patrick Butler and Kendall McCabe | 10/01/2014

The African Story Challenge is a US$1 million program of reporting grants to encourage innovative, multimedia storytelling that aims to improve the health and prosperity of Africans. It was launched by former ICFJ Knight Fellow Joseph Wanguru and is run by the African Media Iniative with the support of the International Center for Journalists.

Finalists in the latest round of the contest recently attended a weeklong bootcamp in Marrakech, Morocco to learn about best practices in data journalism and digital media. Below, ICFJ Vice President for Programs Patrick Butler and ICFJ Social Media Officer Kendall McCabe shared some of the boot camp's best tips for journalists.



CC-licensed image courtesy of Peter Ito via Flickr.

Latest News

Refusing to Be Silenced: The Importance of Exiled Media

Today, 71 percent of people live in countries that are considered autocratic. That’s up from 48 percent just a decade ago. The independent research institute at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden that published these figures also found that nearly four dozen more countries are “autocratizing.”

The implications of this are profound. In the most oppressive autocracies, freedom of expression, freedom of association, free and fair elections and other democratic values are absent. In others, they may be present in part but insufficient.

The Journalists Behind Afghan Fact Share How They Counter Disinformation

At the end of 2022, an Afghan journalist sent his colleagues an IJNet Persian article on fact-checking and verification. The piece came with a recommendation: that they should launch a website focused on fact-checking in Afghanistan.

Leveraging AI to Boost Efficiency and Innovation in the News

The rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI) has generated excitement and fear alike within the news industry, prompting many to ponder what lies in store for journalism’s future.

If approached smartly and leveraged strategically, AI offers journalists and their outlets promising potential to boost efficiency and innovation.