Journalism: A Learning Experience for Trainees and Trainer

I’ve always gotten a kick out of training journalists from different countries on a variety of topics because there’s much to pick up in return but the latest batch was particularly interesting and dynamic.

The intensive five-day workshop this month in Dubai grouped young (mostly women) reporters for a Saudi Arabian daily who were eager to learn and put knowledge to practice.

The sense I got was they’re pleased with massive transformations in Saudi Arabia but acknowledge there’s still ground to be broken and want to be part of the change.

I coached the eight rookies – six women and two men (six Saudis, one Filipino and one Palestinian-Ukranian) – on the basics as several had not hailed from media majors in college and some had worked in other areas before entering this field.

Saudi newspaper journalists hone their skills (Abu-Fadil)

My joking questions/comments to them were: “Are you gluttons for punishment? It’s a thankless grueling job with long hours, low pay, increasing cutbacks and resentment by detractors.”

But they laughed and seemed determined to report, tell stories, acquire new skills and make something of it. As an old hack who still believes in journalism, albeit in its multimedia digital forms today, it was gratifying.

The training involved countless exercises based on presentations and discussions about what even “seasoned” writers sometimes take for granted: leads, headlines, grammar, punctuation, story components and structure, to say nothing of contextual background information like history, geography, numbers and visuals.

It was a refresher course for me just preparing the materials, relevant videos, assignments, tools, online research and news tests.

A key session that fits in every workshop I conduct is media ethics, notably in today’s world of alternative facts, disinformation, deep fakes and artificial intelligence-generated news by the likes of research firm OpenAI that can be used for malicious purposes.

Intensive five-day workshop in reporting, writing and editing (Abu-Fadil)  

Ample case studies, online content and videos drove home the point with social media acting as a trigger for much of the fake venom we consume.

But we also delved into interviewing techniques, with a mock exercise filmed and evaluated, the inevitable AP style guide, long considered the industry standard, as well as coverage of speeches, meetings and news conferences.

Screen shot of the 2019 AP Stylebook

Although they’d been doing much of that work, it was an opportunity to fine-tune their competences.

The long afternoon sessions helped the trainees sharpen their writing proficiency with a mix of topics including housing problems, oil spills and their environmental impact, and the hospitality industry.

That last one required fieldwork in Dubai, interviewing people in that business plus some online research. It was interesting to see how they fared gathering the information before putting together the news packages.

One afternoon was dedicated to visiting Bloomberg’s Dubai hub for a briefing on the news gathering and editing operation, including automation and artificial intelligence (AI).

Riad Hamade, executive editor for Middle East and North Africa, Bloomberg News (Abu-Fadil)

I particularly wanted them to see how automation has become an integral part of the news process by talking to those in charge and seeing it in action.

Riad Hamade, executive editor for the Middle East and North Africa at Bloomberg News, was generous with his time and gave them a terrific rundown on his organization’s workings.

He said:

A lot of things that we’ve automated are things that were boring, that were not the reason any of you became journalists. You became journalists because you want to tell good stories, because you want to report. That’s something a machine can’t do yet. What the machine can do is free up your time to do the value added, the thing that makes you want to become a journalist.

According to Hamade, Bloomberg has 19,000 staff (in 176 locations) and 2,700 journalists (including economists and analysts in Bloomberg News & Research).

The organization publishes 5,000 stories daily and its TV channel can be seen in 440 million homes.

While many organizations rely on the AP style manual and/or have developed their own handbook, The Bloomberg Way is a rich guide for that agency’s journalists.

The Bloomberg Way, the news organization's guide for journalists (Abu-Fadil)

The trainees were tasked with watching a video of Bloomberg editor-in-chief John Micklethwait during the Global Editors Network summit in June. 

Micklethwait identified four areas where AI is changing what he does.

The first is the automation of repeatable events like earnings reports, where the technology can produce headlines and a bullet pointed version of a story, minus experts’ quotes. But humans still have to model the templates to guide the AI bots and check for accuracy.

The second is how AI can help transcribe interviews and do automatic translation. The third, he said, is signaling, where the machine does a bit of reporting, and the fourth area is personalization.

Hamade, along with Nayla Razzouk, Bloomberg News Team Leader for Energy and Commodities in the Middle East & North Africa, and Claudia Maedler, the Gulf bureau chief (excluding Saudi Arabia), took us on a tour of the very impressive newsroom and TV studio, which I’d visited before.  

Hamade and Nayla Razzouk explain workings of Bloomberg's Dubai TV studio (Abu-Fadil)

Hamade’s parting advice to the trainees was:

When you’re operating in areas where freedom of the press is not a guarantee, by being balanced and fair, you gain a protective armor, because you’re sticking to the facts. You’re giving everybody a chance to comment. You’re calling the people you’re mentioning…Make every effort to obtain prompt and complete rebuttal to any accusation.

Every so often we need to stop and think why we’re in journalism and how we can make it better.

The young journalists taught me about their aspirations and professional ambitions, and we shared ideas for stories they could pursue post-training. I believe we all benefited from the experience.