ICFJ Knight Roundup: Influencing Mobile News Strategies in India, Africa

By: Alyssa Mesich | 10/09/2015

Each week as part of the Knight International Media Innovators blog, the ICFJ Knight team will round up stories focused on how their fellows are making an impact in the field. Find out more about the fellows' projects by clicking here.

Hacks/Hackers Delhi will host an event to talk mobile news, Code for Africa explains how governments can engage with audiences through mobile and more from the Knight Fellows in this week’s roundup.

Learn how to connect with a mobile news audience in Delhi

Hacks/Hackers Delhi and ICFJ Knight Fellow Nasr ul Hadi are hosting an event on strategies to help transition newsrooms to a digital workflow. Speakers include Nicholas Dawes of the Hindustan Times and Raghav Bahl of Quintillion Media. The event will take place at 3 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 10, at InShorts in Delhi. For more info and to RSVP, visit the event page.

Improving public engagement through mobile tools in Ghana

Some local governments are finding new ways to engage citizens, opting for mobile for development (M4D) programs over radio discussions and town halls. Suhuyini Salim Shani, an Open Government Fellow with Code for Africa and the Open Knowledge Foundation and the lead implementer at VOTO Mobile, explains how local government can crowdsource information using mobile engagement tools, such as interactive voice surveys. These new technologies can enrich local policy and ensure vulnerable groups are heard. His recent blog published on Code for Africa’s Medium highlights his experience with M4D in Ghana.

Reclaiming the African story

At the Third Africa & Digitalisation Conference last week in Kigali, Rwanda, ICFJ Knight Fellow Stephen Abbott Pugh showcased Code for Africa’s work providing low-cost tools and building media partnerships across the African continent. Code for Africa’s tech tools are created by a pan-African federation of open data and civic tech labs.

Mapping toilets

Code for South Africa and partner Ndifuna Ukwazi have launched an eye-catching project — a database of toilet facilities in informal settlements near Cape Town. In this blog post, data wrangler and consultant Julia Renouprez explains how she cleaned up the dataset and mapped the toilets. The database will help maintenance crews repair damaged toilets.

Don’t forget…

The 2015 Global Investigative Journalism Conference is happening now in Lillehammer, Norway, until Oct. 11. Follow #GIJC15 for conference highlights and the ICFJ Knight team on Twitter: ICFJ VP Patrick Butler and ICFJ Knight Fellows Justin Arenstein, Chris Roper, Chris Guess and Catherine Gicheru.

Main image CC-licensed by Flickr via Jhaymesisviphotography.

This post is also published on IJNet, which is produced by ICFJ.

Related Programs
ICFJ Knight Fellowships
Topics
Media Innovation
Country/Region
Sub-Saharan Africa
South Asia

Latest News

Guidance for Building Trust with the Communities You Serve

Trust in the media has fallen globally. 

Today on average, according to Reuters Institute’s 2023 Digital News Report, just four in 10 people say they trust news most of the time. Amid this decline, people are also more likely to avoid consuming news coverage.

One way journalists and news organizations

How to Develop an Ethical AI Use Policy for a Nonprofit

Technology changes quickly, and as it does, it often leaves us wondering “What does this mean for us?” When ChatGPT ushered in a new era of accessible artificial intelligence (AI) tools in 2023, our staff here at the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ) were full of questions about what this meant for our work, our mission and journalism in general. 

To support our staff, we embarked on a project to develop a policy that provides guidance on how the organization will use AI tools. And because we know we aren’t alone in answering these big questions, we wanted to share the lessons we learned along the way to help other organizations that are in the midst of creating their own policy.

Cross-Border Journalism Network Amplifies Local Solutions

Guyot, who officially launched the Human Journalism Network as an ICFJ Knight Fellow in 2023, said his goal is to highlight how people are making progress on social challenges in ways that are not only interesting but potentially useful.