adminMelody Mashaire Herald Reporter
THE Voluntary Media Council of Zimbabwe (VMCZ) has launched an investigative journalism fund and awards aimed at promoting media professionalism, ethics and enhancing public interest journalism in Zimbabwe. Addressing editors and journalists in Harare on Wednesday, VMCZ executive director Loughty Dube said the fund will assist the media to broadcast and write investigative stories.
“The fund is to assist the media so that it will be able to do investigative stories. It will allow the media to be able to do thorough digging for them to do a lot of incisive investigations and thorough coverage of issues that they would like to write or broadcast about,” he said.
He said VMCZ was targeting investigative journalists in all media houses.
“We are targeting the journalists themselves, investigative journalists in all newsrooms both in print and in broadcasting. We want to capacitate senior journalists to be able to do investigative stories and expose things that happen that are not above board in public institutions and also in private institutions,” he said.
Dube said the fund was a pilot project that will run from June and end in the same month next year. “The fund will effectively start at the beginning of June and end the following year in June. “It is a pilot project we are putting in place to ensure that the media is capacitated to write these investigative stories,” he said.
He said the awards were an incentive to allow reporters to concentrate on more investigative stories. “At the end of the reporting, there will be awards where we will have the reporter of the year and two runners-up after the completion of the awards. This is an incentive to allow the reporters to concentrate on more investigative stories and thoroughly investigated stories.
“It is an incentive to say that there is a need to dig deeper into the basic stories that we have.
“It is a good thing for them to go out and look beyond the surface when they are covering their stories,” he said.
Online Reporter