Ms Trudy Kernighan, Canadian High Commissioner in Ghana, on Friday stressed the need for a mutually beneficial relationship between non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and journalists in order to achieve their common goals.
Ms Kernighan made the call at a day’s workshop for journalists and NGOs on how to pitch stories to the press and how journalists can use NGOs for story ideas and sources.
It was organised by Journalists for Human Rights (JHR) and the Canadian High Commission on the theme: “Bridging the Gap.”
She said the media was very powerful and the most important ally of NGOs and should therefore cultivate a symbiotic relationship with each other.
“NGOs work directly with the communities while the media disseminate information to the community and relevant policymakers about what happen in the society. Journalists, in order to write accurately, can get statistics and relevant information from the NGOS,” she said.
Ms Jenny Vaughan, overseas Co-ordinator of JHR, said the purpose of the workshop was to ensure that journalists and NGOs understood each other.
She asked the media to go beyond using what was written in press releases by researching and doing hard-hitting in-depth stories.
Ms Adisa Lansah, a communications specialist with Plan Ghana, an NGO said NGOs could be useful to journalists as sources of relevant information on specific issues.
“NGOs can be a source of story ideas. We do not want you (journalists) to just report on an event but to have a feel of what happens on the ground and to write about it,” she stressed.
Ms Lansah added that the media could act as pressure group to bring issues such as corruption and human rights abuses to the knowledge of government and educate the public through the information provided by NGO’s through research.
She cited lack of proper networking and understanding between journalists and NGO’s among the reasons widening the gap among the two entities.
Ms Lansah called on NGOs to put their research findings in context so that journalists working on them could better understand them.
Participants at the workshop brainstormed on how both parties could stay connected, how to write a perfect press release, writing award-winning articles from press releases and how to plan media campaigns.