New Media Workshop For Malagasy Journalists At The APC – Starting With Twitter

A workshop on new media was held at the American Press Center on April 24 during the “Friday Talk” session. It was co-organized by the APC and Telomiova.

The attendees were given a “suitable dozen page tutorial for journalists” to help them have a good start point and clear guide lines for a first time use of this social networking tool (what are followers, how to follow someone, who to follow as a journalist …). And God knows how useful it was.

The goal of the project was to show Malagasy journalists how to take advantages of the use of new media in their job. After a brief debate on “why use new media?”, because we had to convince some of journalists, Hery Zo led the workshop helped by the Telomiova crew and Foko guys. We started with the micro-blogging on Twitter.

Ando was among the journalists who were interested in the workshop. And here is a video of her telling what she thinks of it.

As she says, it needs more practice. It’s hard to assimilate a lot of information (that are new to you) in 2 hours. Anyway, there are those who could create their own twitter account. What I want to know now is whether they are going to use it or not. Here are the new Malagasy twitter users that day : @razafintsalama @rakotoarilala @radonnah @momoty @tatamada @gagane05 @ando007

After explaining them the basis of Twitter and its basic use we told them that it is also possible to tweet from a mobile phone. A very useful feature for a reporter on site. We tried to activate their mobiles but the setup was costly. The international SMSs are 5 times more expensive than the local ones and this is still a big issue in developping countries like Madagascar.

We continued with “How to setup alerts on google news” and “How to use RSS feeds on mobile phones” but I’ll talk about it in my next post.

[Update] You can read Saveoursmile’s report on Telomiova.

PS : I finally made it. Two 40 seconde videos. What I have not figured out till now is why when I use Firefox (or Google Chrome) to upload my vids on Youtube it always fails. But once I use IE … it works!! Ariniaina, try to upload with Internet Explorer to see if it works.