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Effective reporting on oil…ExxonMobil and GPA use joint effort to train media
Reporters from the various media houses in Guyana are benefitting from a two-day media training on the oil, gas and energy sector.
The media training being held at the conference room of Herdmanston Lodge started yesterday.
Journalists of different media houses engaging in their lunch break from the training session
The training was streamed with a list of objectives in which each journalist would gain knowledge and possess the skills after the course of the training sessions.
These objectives include explaining technical industry terms for non-specialist audience, carrying out effective interviews with relative authorities, explaining how oil prices work and the factors that influence oil prices among others.
The training hosted by Wesley Gibbings and Lisa Essex enlightened the reporters of the ethics in oil journalism. Gathering, assessing, creating, and presenting news and information on the aspect of crude oil, natural gas and energy, is essentially what ‘oil journalism’ entails.
Wesley Gibbings is a founder-member of the Association of Caribbean Media Workers (ACM). He was elected president of the regional media body during its biennial general meeting in 2007.
The Trinidadian journalist and poet covered Caribbean public affairs for over 30 years.
Lisa Essex is an international journalism trainer, editor and writer who works extensively in the developing world. She is the author of several handbooks for the European Journalism Centre.
Lisa worked for Reuters for 15 years. She was bureau chief in New York during the attacks on the World Trade Centre. She also worked as a political and financial journalist, radio and television presenter. Prior to that, she worked at Bloomberg Business news and Knight Ridder Financial.
Regarding to the ethics of oil journalism, Essex highlighted the importance of avoiding ‘gifts’ when reporting not merely on the oil sector, as this principle advocates for good journalism as a whole.
What this means, is that a good journalist would not accept any form of paying off to cast a shadow on significant issues to prevent it from the public eye.
To even make her point more resounding, she shared her experience with the journalists present at the training.
Wesley Gibbins, in his presentation, encouraged journalists to be sceptical about almost everything. As such, he taught the gathering extensively on verification.
In light of this, he educated journalists of getting it right with sources and ‘problematic social media’ being a hindrance to good journalism. He explained that not having the primary sources or the best sources can result in disinformation and misinformation.
He also spoke of transparency as well as propaganda in journalism among many other things.
The experts featured the training session with exercises that allowed the journalists to identify common mistakes and provided some alternatives on how to avoid them. They also provided additional guidance on how to write an energy story.
Guyana is steaming ahead in being an oil producing nation. As such, the media will be engaged in countless reports on the oil sector.
It is ideal that the media gain the know-how to effectively report on oil, as this will be the future of the country. In this regard, Wesley Gibbins pointed out that Trinidad has been in the oil sector for more than 100 years. Thus, he said, Trinidad has the experience in the oil and energy field.
He added that therefore, Trinidad has the ability to do certain things as it pertains to oil and gas. He furthermore underscored that even reporting on oil needs some extra skills from those who has been in the field for years.
The bottom line is that Gibbins indicated to the journalists that reporting should be done in the best way possible so that the common people can understand, since the oil sector is relatively new them as opposed to those who have been living in it for years.
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