A collaborative training workshop for citizen journalists on ‘News report writing on public service delivery’

Open Development Cambodia in collaboration with the Cambodian Center for Independent Media (CCIM) hosted a two-day training workshop in Siem Reap. On 28 February and 1 March, 16 citizen journalists from across the country learned to write stories covering public services in their communities. ODC and CCIM together aimed to improve the participants’ skills of effective news reporting and their know-how to use ODC’s online platform for their journalistic research. The workshop is run under the project “Improving the delivery of public services through information and communication technology (ICT)”, funded by SPIDER.​

Group photo on the first day of the training.

“What can citizen journalists do to improve the delivery of public services?” and “How can they report grievances in their own community?” Those were the key questions which guided the participants of ODC’s latest training through two days of workshop sessions. The 16 citizen journalists who attended the training workshop now better know how to report about public services related issues within their community.

To foster the skills of the participants, the first day of training workshop, Thy Try, ODC’s Executive director/Editor-in-chief first gave an introduction to the project and the functionalities of the ODC’s online platform. The website is a helpful tool to find information concerning ‘access to public services’ and the social and economic development in Cambodia. For the citizen journalists, the referencing information are crucial to find topics, to write their reports, and to investigate grievances. Thanks to the intuitive interactive maps on ODC’s website, users can visualize data about health services, education and many more topics at one place. Not only can journalists use this information for their own research, but they can also use the maps to render a topic more understandable for readers.

In the next step, Kun Chenda from CCIM worked with the trainees to bring the information they assessed into a journalistic form. Trainees learned and practiced the basic rules of journalism and discussed the aspects of good reporting, such as different journalistic angles an observer can assume.

Mr. Kun Chenda, CCIM staff, is giving a presentation to the trainee on the overview of journalistic skill.

The participants could apply the newly gained knowledge in the following part of the training, in which they practiced how to report about grievances related to public services in their own community. Some participants, for example, raised the question why the promised improvements of infrastructure as a refund for economic land concessions have not been realized until today. Another group was looking into accusations made by many citizens that they still have to pay for administrative services which are actually promised to be free of charge.​ And some also mentioned the improvement of good public service in their communities.. These examples show that the empowerment of well equipped citizen journalists can give the local communities a voice to make the community’s complaints being heard.

The citizen journalists are discussing about the issues related to the public services in their community.

The citizen journalists are brainstorming about the issues related to the public services in their community.

Apart from the positive feedback ODC received from the participants, they also suggested some improvements. Some trainees, for example, criticized that certain data on the ODC platform are not up to date and offered their help to contribute some updates. Another note concerned the use of the ODC platform on the cellphone. Participants unanimously wished for a more mobile-friendly version of the website in order to simplify their research. ODC is thankful for these critical feedback and will try to implement the improvements as soon as possible.

Group photo on the last day of the successful training.

The two joyful days in Siem Reap were another step towards ODC’s goal to equip citizens to report about what is happening in their communities – a mission which is crucial because communication between local authorities, service providers and citizens has found to be absent in many cases in the past. ODC is planning conduct two more trainings in the near future and will use the participants’ feedback to improve this project. The trainees will implement this knowledge into their work as citizen journalists back in their communities.