Al-Qalam 
[Photo source - The Movement 2000]
Al-Qalam Reporter
Veteran Muslim journalists will come together in Durban this month for a pilot media boot camp to help ordinary people turn into citizen journalists.
The initiative called The Citizen Journalism Boot Camp for Muslims will introduce youth and adults to community activism and journalism opportunities in the media industry.
It will be held on May 28-29.
Two community activists, Rashid Chopdat and Annisa Essack, have teamed up to host the programme which aims to attract emerging Muslim journalists.
Chopdat has been involved in business and community work for over 40 years and founded the DAWN Education and Leadership Centre, more than 17 years ago.
Media has been one of his passions and he saw the need to host a programme of this nature due to an evident lack of skills in the community.
Essack has been involved in radio broadcasting for over 25 years, having worked with several Muslim stations.
“While attending a community project involving youth, Annisa and I observed that they were tech-savvy and inclined to volunteer their time – even for the media. But there was one drawback. They needed experienced hands to advise and guide them to become Citizen Journalists and activists. Hence, we saw the need to start training programmes as a long-term plan to attract and educate Muslims to become involved in the media and to offer articles to various broadcast mediums,” said Chopdat.
He said these people also had the potential to apply their skills to undertake activism projects.
“It is a pilot course that we plan to offer for free to the first group. In addition, we will choose to cover the transport costs of ten delegates from previously disadvantaged communities,” said Chopdat.
Chopdat said the long-term plan is to build a network of journalists serving the Ummah and community interests.
Overall, the boot camp will see two main objectives: Citizen Journalism and Journalism Activists.
“We want to encourage and skill participants to report the news as community members instead of professional journalists. They will learn the definition of citizen journalism and explore examples of how the public spread the news. Participants will learn how to use media to promote a social cause in a short course providing valuable information and guidance,” said Chopdat.
Training
Chopdat said it was critical to have a programme of this nature, because it was important to guide the Ummah into the new world order of media.
“There has never been in the history of this country, some kind of structural approach, to developing our youth, right from high school to university, and even at employee level. This is something that has been lacking. We felt we needed to create this niche so that people know there’s a forum they can approach for a structured training programme when it comes to media and reporting. That was the thinking behind this,” said Chopdat.
The programme will see roughly 50 participants from around KwaZulu-Natal.
“Of the 50 seats, some seats are being allocated to dawah centres, high school students and university students. The remainder of the seats are all going to public applicants. We have been doing interviews for applicants,” said Chopdat.
Chopdat said the boot-camp will hopefully be the start to a much bigger initiative which could soon have a national footprint.
“For now the applicants are restricted to KZN only. But we are going to do a very strong SWOT analysis to see if the content was relevant and take it forward from there. Awqaf SA, one of our funders said they would like to see the programme expand to Jo’burg as well. This is the beginning and we also felt as a follow-up, we’ve asked certain media organisations if they would be keen to offer some of the candidates some sort of internship as well. Many have expressed interest,” said Chopdat.
The programme will run over the two-day period and will be well structured so that participants can acquire as many skills as possible from the training.
Muslim journalists from around South Africa will be present to train attendees by providing insights and valuable information which will help hone the skills of ordinary citizens. It will consist of different topics to cover all aspects of journalism, its values, principles, ethics and legalities.
Link for Citizen Journalism Bootcamp for Muslims
