Radio journalists who regularly produce features can get stuck in a rut or develop bad habits. After a while, their work can start sounding a little formulaic. In this two-part post, radio producer and trainer Kyle James offers advice on putting a bit of zing back in your features and taking your audio packages one step further.

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In the latest installment of African Stories, see how garbage is turned into energy, hear about the fight against a devastating banana disease and meet Kampala’s grandfather of electronics as well as an AIDS activist determined to speak out about the disease.

The feature reports were recently produced as part of the 2013 African Stories series of workshops for TV journalists, camera operators, cutters and technicians (scroll to the bottom of the post to see the videos).

TV stations from 16 English and French speaking African countries are taking part in the long-term project to sharpen their skills and at the same time, produce compelling stories about everyday people and everday lives in Africa (you can find out more about the African Stories project here).

In August, TV teams from Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda met in Kampala for an 11-day workshop. This time, the DW Akademie trainers stepped up the challenge by introducing techniques for filming with a moving camera – a skill that needs some practice.

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What is StoryMaker?

Do you have an Android smartphone? Then you’re set to produce multimedia stories. StoryMaker is an open source Android app designed to help you learn how to gather, produce and publish multimedia stories.

You can use the app to shoot and edit photo and video; record audio; produce an audio slideshow, and, write text. You can then combine these multimedia elements into a finished story and publish it on your social media networks and on the StoryMaker platform. But as well as being a story production and publishing tool, StoryMaker is a training app offering lessons on journalism, audio, photography, videography and security.

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Be creative, experiment and learn through play.

This is something I’m always trying to encourage participants to do during any workshop. But particularly when it comes to learning about multimedia, or using a mobile phone for reporting, and getting used to new types of media for storytelling.

So what’s up with using the mobile messaging service WhatsApp as a tool to complement training in workshops? Well, potentially a lot… particularly for practical exercises. But first, if you haven’t yet dialled into the world of WhatsApp, here’s a quick overview.

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Digital technologies are completely changing the face of journalism. This transformation presents new challenges for training journalists because it’s no longer practicable for upcoming reporters to only have skills in a single medium.

Instead, during their training, journalists need to be exposed to diverse narrative forms and modes of representation used in all media, from radio and television to print and online.

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It’s the size of a Post-It note and makes a WiFi network using either a 3G mobile data SIM card or a local area network. Freelance trainer Guy Degen takes a look at the TP-Link 3G mobile wifi router – a useful bit of kit for journalists and journalism trainers on the road.

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Google Chrome might well become the world’s most popular browser this year. It has already overtaken Mozilla Firefox and is well positioned to overtake Internet Explorer whose share dropped from 46 to 38.5 percent last year.

Chrome is a very easy browser to use and offers a number of useful extensions and apps. Google has redesigned Chrome’s interface allowing you to shift between most visited sites and Chrome apps. That means you can significantly increase your browser’s functionality.

So how can journalists make the best use of Google Chrome? Here are 20 free apps to check out and let us know if can recommend useful Chrome apps for journalism.

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In the previous blog post on training mobile journalism, freelance trainer Guy Degen discussed smartphones and operating systems, useful free apps for training courses and managing installation of apps for trainees.

This blog post will look at some basic phone settings trainees should know, what to think about when developing a workflow for producing multimedia content with a mobile phone; editing and managing content produced by trainees in the field, tips for mobile journalism training assignments and some useful accessories for training.

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A good interview should be informative, authentic, credible and sometimes even surprising. In the past two weeks, the participants in our workshop ‘Advanced Interview Training’ were able to discover the special benefits of this journalistic format.

Together with my colleague Uli Köhler, I am training journalists in the Vietnamese capital Hanoi. Our 15 trainees  work for Vietnam Television (VTV). Most of them are reporters in Hanoi, but we’ve also got the VTV correspondents to Russia and to China in our group. All of our participants are keen to learn more about conducting interviews and recording vox pops.

As Uli and I will leave Vietnam in a couple of days, the trainees are now working on their final productions. Their topic is ‘same-sex marriage in Vietnam’. They chose this topic themselves after an hour-long discussion.

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“Our Radio!” is a cooperation project between the German Agency for International Cooperation (GIZ), DW Akademie and the Ghana Independent Broadcasters’ Association (GIBA).

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