Sanjana Hattotuwa, Special Advisor at the ICT4Peace Foundation, was invited by the Centre for Investigative Journalism Nepal to support a workshop for leading journalists from around the country in the use of online, social and digital media in investigative journalism. Sanjana taught two days of a four day workshop, and focussed on social media strategies for bearing witness to, and communicating inconvenient truths, the use of film, audio and photography in media campaigns including in cross-platform investigative stories, and the importance of social media engagement in a country that now has eight million monthly Facebook users alone, leave aside those on Twitter, Instagram and using instant messaging apps.
Sanjana’s lectures dealt with theory, regional and international examples of best practices as well as a lot of hands on, practical exercises around key apps, platforms, services and tools.
Participants learnt about capturing compelling video and photos from the field, dealing with whistleblowers who shared material online, anonymous content publication online, mapping using Google MyMaps and OpenStreetMap, leveraging data from Facebook’s metrics to amplify and produce content, how to create long-form journalism on key platforms for the web, the creation of podcasts for distribution over social media and a number of other tools anchored to the local context and the use of Nepali in the primary content production, in addition to English.
