The three-day course was held on February 21 to 23 in Shtip, North Macedonia.
In the previous training, in November 2024, the BIRN team guided the young journalists on finding and developing story ideas through checking public records, formulating access to information requests and identifying sources.
During the past three months, the participants made progress in researching and gathering information about the story ideas agreed in November.
The focus of the third training was improving journalists’ skills in storytelling and preparing them for the final presentations of their stories, expected in the coming period.
The participants learned from the BIRN team how to develop a good story lead that grabs the attention of the audience and how to build the structure of a story from the beginning to the end, inserting different types of information in each section of the structure.
The young journalists practised their newly developed skills directly on the stories they are working on as a part of the 2024-2025 training courses.
The importance of field research was highlighted during the training. As most of the participants have already done some field work on their stories, in the training session they had the opportunity to practice how to better describe what they’ve seen and experienced in the field, how to filter important from unimportant field information, how to pay attention to details and how to observe not only what’s there but also what’s missing.
The complexity of describing big data and providing context was also addressed during the training. Participants were shown examples of how to use analogies in presenting big numbers to make them more comprehensible for the audience, as well as how to use charts and graphs to better present complex data.
Developing specific writing techniques was also a part of the training, with participants having the opportunity to learn and practice how to best structure their sentences to make them easy to read.