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New media technology with its ample opportunities of communication was at the centre stage of the Advanced Digital Journalism Workshop, held at the School of Journalism & Media Studies, Rhodes University in Grahamstown (3-7 Sept 2007). Sponsored by NIZA (Netherlands Institute for Southern Africa), this online training course brought together 35 Print, Radio and TV journalists from the African continent focusing on both theory and practice of digital journalism.

Under the experienced leadership of Dr. Peter Verweij from the School of Journalism at Utrecht in the Netherlands, the young journalists not only received an overview of the change of society and journalism after the digital revolution, but learned how to use IC-Technology in journalism. In the computer lab of the “Africa Media Matrix” building they did advanced searches on the internet, designed their own websites and produced stories. Eventually they started their own blog. The course was geared at getting familiar with the available tools to create sites and use photos, slideshows, audio and video for multimedia production.

Furthermore, the journalists organised a newsroom, gave roles and tasks to each other and continued to work with their newly gained skills knowledge in practice at the Digital Citizen Indaba (9 Sept 2007) which was held at Rhodes University for the second time this year. The aim was to bring together bloggers, citizen journalists, media practitioners and industry experts all under one roof to debate issues around African online identity, blogging diaspora and the challenges of the content. The highly motivated workshop participants researched stories gathered through interacting with these experts and edited the material in their newsroom. ( Here an example.)

The Online Workshop led to the Highway Africa Conference (10-12 Sept 2007), the largest annual gathering of African journalists in the world. The Conference offered another possibility for the online workshop students to produce stories for their websites and blogs and to network with more than 500 delegates from different regions in Africa.