The Exposed.Quest The Quest for X ! (EQ) has held another training for early-career journalists on the nuances of impactful social justice reporting. The training, which was held in Lagos on Thursday, had a total of 22 attendees. EQ had selected 30 of the 133 applications received.

During the training, Fisayo Soyombo, the founder and editor-in-chief of EQ, gave reasons the organisation is keen about social justice reporting and its impacts.

Soyombo emphasised the numerous impacts that EQ’s social justice reports have yielded despite the organisation’s relatively young existence. He revealed that many other journalism outlets avoid social justice reporting because of its potential to conflict with the interests of society’s bigwigs, who are often the financial backbone of the media.

Fisayo Soyombo, EQ’s founder and editor-in-chief, delivers lectures on social justice reporting.

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Soyombo said many papers run away from social justice reporting “because they feel their sources of livelihood will then be affected”.

“At the end of the day, you can’t even rely on that kind of patronage,” he said.

He said that because of EQ’s commitment to social justice, the organisation had lost some of its potential customers. He, however, told attendees that similar experiences should not deter them from embarking on social justice reports.

The founder also encouraged early-career journalists to pursue excellence. He said that while fellowships are important and helpful, young journalists should only opt for fellowships that align with their career goals, emphasising that much more than fellowships, the primary duty of every journalist is to report and that it is only through impactful reporting that the desired heights of any journalist, even financial goals, can be achieved.

“If money is the most important thing to you in life, I don’t understand why you should end up as a journalist. It’s not realistic. But if it is important to you but not the most important and the things that are more important to you include impact, then it is what you should do, and you would find your feet at some point,” Fisayo said.

READ ALSO: EQ Trains Early-Career Journalists in Social Justice Reporting

The last session of the training, taken by Valentine Chukwu, EQ’s monitoring and evaluation officer, was about the various metrics that could be employed in measuring the impacts of social justice stories. Valentine made a distinction between outcomes and outputs. According to him, while outputs are the quantitative yields of a social justice story, outcomes are the societal adjustments that have been birthed by such report.

“The outputs may include the number of social media shares and the traction that your story generates, while outcomes are the broader social changes your story aims to achieve,” he said.

Valentine Chukwu teaching attendees how to measure impact

Folaranmi Ajayi, one of the attendees, averred that the training was impactful, especially because it was pragmatic in approach.

“Another thing I learned is that everybody can do social justice if you have what it takes. And then, young and upcoming journalists should focus on the impact that it would cause, learning on the job, and not focus on the money,” Ajayi said.

This training, which was also held in 2022 and 2023, was organised in collaboration with the Wole Soyinka Centre for Investigative Journalism (WSCIJ)’s Collaborative Media Engagement for Development, Inclusion and Accountability (CMEDIA) project.

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