KENYA: My Reflection On The Training for AMECEA Online News Correspondents
The AMECEA Social Communications Department recently hosted a workshop for the Association’s online news correspondents in Nairobi, Kenya from 24th to 28th March 2019 aiming at enhancing the capacity of correspondents and improving the quality of online news and forming multimedia journalists.
The workshop focused on using the digital media for evangelization, peace building and applying the guidelines for international and local online news reporting.
Content of the training included photography, video editing and web blogging so that a journalist is not only a writer and reporter but also a photographer who can tell a story through picture; an editor with capacity of publishing short videos; also a web blogger who can share stories over the web and multimedia platforms.
“People have been reporting about us and how we look like, it is time for us to write our own stories,” said Rev. Fr. Anthony Makunde, Secretary General of AMECEA
Personally, attending this workshop it gave me motivation that we need to write and share more stories about the Catholic Church activities within and out of Ethiopia. As we are managing the Ethiopian Catholic Church website and social media, this workshop encouraged us to be more engaged with the digital generation as we are in the era of digital evangelization.
As a young person who is directly involved in creating the digital space for our Church in Ethiopia, I have been able to see ways and means of sharing our stories, and in a way, support the evangelization mission of the Church in an engaging manner.
The stories we have behind Religious congregations of women are highlighting the role the Catholic Church is playing in uplifting the human dignity of the poor and disadvantaged in the society.
Each activity done by priests, nuns and lay people are examples of practical evangelization; unfortunately, most of them are not shared and they have not been communicated through the media to the world.
Digital communication is a way for the Church in Africa to attract the youth and keep communication open and engaging between the youth and pastoral agents. Moving from just using the traditional means of communication to a more vibrant and engaging communication is just what we need at the moment.
This short but effective training has armed us with multi-task communication skills fit for digital communication. I look forward to all of us who participated in the training applying them so as to scale up our digital and other communications efforts in collaboration with all my colleagues.
I also feel the need to make some contributions to the forthcoming Strategic Plan so that our communication department makes further efforts to strengthen our work.
The workshop was a networking opportunity for me, and indeed all the participants, to create contacts with other AMECEA communicators and see how our Church at AMECEA level is working. We have learnt a lot from interacting with one another; it is good to be familiar with colleagues from the region, some of whom I met during the 19th AMECEA Plenary.
Training and working together with colleagues in communication has created a sense of oneness amongst us and the feeling that we can call upon one another for our communications needs.
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By Bezawit Assefa
