By Mama A. Touray
The British Broadcast Corporation (BBC) focus on Africa Journalist, Esau Williams, during his training with the MAJaC students has made it clear to the students that if they want to grow professionally, they cannot do that in isolation.
Mr. Williams who held a three-day training at the school on Friday, therefore, advised the students to surround themselves with people who can actually help them grow, inspire them, and, “professionally (you can) develop your career and that is how you build capacity for the long run.”
To change and improve the standard he reiterated that they should always surround themselves with people who will always force them to think new and to be a better version of themselves.
Highlighting the reason for the training, Mr. Williams said the training was meant to add to their capacity and the journalistic work that journalists do in The Gambia, such as writing and gathering news, sourcing, presenting, editing, and interviewing.
“All these are the skills we are trying to improve upon as year after year we have issues with the National Journalism Awards where we don’t think that the quality of journalism is up to scratch and this is just an effort to improve that,” he stated.
He noted that topics taken were crucial as they formed the bedrock of any proper journalistic career.
“It is just trying to share and not inspire, this is a situation in that we are sharing knowledge and not that I’m coming to teach people, it was just about discussing best practices and methods of doing the craft we all love so much and having done this for about 13 years at BBC World Service.
“It is something that I enjoy doing in terms of sharing knowledge and understanding what the challenges of Gambian journalism are and as a team how best we can overcome that,” he said
He, however, advised participants to record their voices by reading from a newspaper or anything readable as a way of improving the job they do.
Meanwhile, Adama Sanneh, a participant said “I have learned new things about journalism that we are not fortunate to learn in class, one of the most important things we talked about which really helped me, and I’m sure it is going to shape me as a journalist that is the issue of abstract thinking. Thinking beyond what everyone thinks because sometimes we tend to limit ourselves to a certain part of our ability not knowing we can be able to do much more than that.”
