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“Our approach is to understand how new media technologies transform African news environments and consumption and how they can be incorporated with traditional media to improve journalism,” says Rhodes University lecturer Jude Mathurine. Mathurine, who heads the School of Journalism’s New Media Lab, was talking about the KAS Digital Journalism workshop which prepared ten scholars to ‘blog’ the twelfth installment of Highway Africa, the continent's biggest journalism conference in August this year.

The community radio and newspaper journalists from Kenya, Zambia, Malawi and Uganda spent four days discovering the ins and outs of data-assisted reporting, writing for the Web and blog production before putting ideas into action on the daily conference blog.

Scholars also learnt about Creative Commons and Open Source, Digital Divides and the logic behind big media companies’ new media strategies.

“Including a combination of theory and practice (praxis) into a course on blogging really helped students understand the background of the many of the high-end discussions and debates that happened at Highway Africa,” Mathurine said.

Scholar blog posts were aggregated on the Highway Africa website. Some of the scholars’ writings also appeared on media news aggregator journalism.co.za and even a Spanish ICT blog.

Some of the corporate blogs that the journalists set up continue to run.

One used his blog to reflect on the recent Zambian presidential elections. New Vision Bureau chief Frank Mugabi posted reports on the circumstances in Northern Uganda in the area bordering DRC. And Shifa Mwesigye from Kenya continues to publish ChanelNo5, a popular kind of Kenyan version of Sex and the City.

Highway Africa distributed Open Source and freeware software to

scholars to help with newspaper production and picture, video and

sound-editing back home.

“Technologies used in training contexts are frequently not available to scholars when they return home,” Mathurine explained.