Peace Journalism Proposal

        I would like to propose a peace journalism project for the country of Nigeria. There are three key goals for this project. The first goal would be to teach Nigerian journalists the ethical standards of conflict reporting, and show them how to utilize peace journalism to cover stories without further escalating violence. The second goal would be educate journalists to have a better understanding about both Christianity and Islam, along with the similarities of each religion and how to cover conflict regarding religion. The third goal would be to create a lasting peace effort after the project is concluded by creating peace groups. 


      The focus of the project is to prevent further religious violence in Nigeria between the northern Muslim citizens and the southern Christian populace. Some of the religious violence has been caused by the media’s lack of understanding or negligence, for instance the article written in 2002 in the This Day paper regarding the prophet Muhammad and the Miss World Pageant contestants. The article sparked riots resulting in more than 100 deaths and 3000 homeless. The peace journalism project aims to prevent any further religious violence started or escalated by the media. Moreover, the focus is on preventing religious violence because it is rampant in Nigeria with numerous bombings, and riots. Preventing this violence could potentially save thousands of lives, homes and millions of dollars in property loss in the future.


       The project would take course over a period of three months, and would begin in May of 2013. The project would contain ten workshops with 20 total seminars. Ten seminars would be teaching journalists about peace journalism. The other ten seminars would be teaching journalists about Christianity and Islam, similarities of the two, and how to report stories involving religious conflict. Each workshop would consist of three days. Day one would be peace journalism training, and day two would be religious awareness training. On day three, community leaders and the public would be invited to begin a peace club in their area where they would be responsible for monitoring media and ensuring they see peaceful responsible reporting. Our media trainers would set out in the community to accomplish this task as well as go to media houses and try to establish a written code of ethics for the outlets. We believe twenty seminars is an appropriate number of trainings to teach journalists all the needed information at the 10 different states we will be traveling to within a three month period. 


      The locations for the workshops are Kano, Yobe, Niger, Oyo, Imo, Lagos, Adam Awa, Taraba, Kaduna and Abuja. We will hold seminars here because these states are great representations of the country. We have included both majority Islam and Christian states to create balance. We also included locations from central, north, south, east and west Nigeria to increase the reach of our project.  Most of these states have experienced religious violence, for instance Kaduna was the state where religious violence erupted in 2002 and Lagos was the state where the incriminating newspaper was based out of.


        The possible participants would be journalists from newspapers including but not limited to the Guardian, This Day, Daily Trust, and New Nigerian and News Watch. These papers are located in widespread parts of Nigeria. Other television participants may include reporters from NN24, Nigerian Television Authority, Silverbird TV, Minaj TV, and Galaxy TV. These stations are also located throughout Nigeria and are both privately owned and state run. We would also invite radio journalist participants from FRCN, Voice of Nigeria, Ray Power, and Freedom Radio. These stations are also dispersed throughout Nigeria and are both privately owned and state run. We want to train this group of journalists because they are a great representation of the media force in Nigeria. By training journalists in newspaper, television and radio we can extend our projects reach, and create a bigger impact and more possibilities for peace. By incorporating these participants in our seminars we can teach media personnel peace journalism skills that will be taken all over Nigeria to be put into action over several mediums.


         Possible media trainers could include Steven Youngblood, a Communications Professor and the Director for the Center of Global Peace Journalism at Park University. He has taught several peace journalism seminars in various parts of Africa as well peace journalism classes in the United States. Another possible media trainer could be Dr. Habil Klaus Paehler head of the KAS office in Nigeria. KAS organization has taught conflict sensitive reporting skills in northern Nigeria previously. Possible religious awareness trainers could be Pastor James Wuye and Imam Muhammad Ashata. They were former enemies who are now working together for reconciliation among Christians and Muslims in Nigeria.  These men represent each religion individually but together they represent the peace that can be possible through education. They believe “peace will be achieved through education and dialog.” We believe they would be the perfect duo to teach our religious awareness seminars throughout Nigeria. 


         We will achieve the first goal of the campaign by teaching ten thorough peace journalism seminars to a wide variety of journalists throughout ten different states in Nigeria. The media trainers we have proposed are very skilled and knowledgeable teachers who have had experience leading and teaching peace journalism in Africa and Nigeria.  We will reach the second goal by teaching ten detailed religious awareness seminars to the same journalists in the ten different states. The Imam and the Pastor we have chosen to teach the religious workshops have great knowledge about their religions and are open to teaching others, exposing misconceptions, and working for peace in a collaborative way. This will allow journalists to learn and enhance their understanding so they can produce more informed reports. Finally, we will meet our last goal by establishing the peace groups in the communities. These groups will act as a watchdog and protect peace and ensure it continues in the future. We will also ensure lasting peace journalism efforts with the written codes of conduct which we will try installed at local media outlets.  With a combination of these efforts and careful planning all goals will be met in the three months we have set out for this project.