Want to learn how to turn dull data into sexy stories?

Launched in February this year, the Academy is Africa’s first bricks-and-mortar data journalism training centre for working journalists.

When the current cohort ends at the end of August, 10 working journalists will have been through the programme. See some of their work here.

The six week programme consists of a combination of theoretical and hands-on practical work. Participants spend much of their time each day working on a large project alongside experienced data journalists, developers, analysts and data wranglers.

In addition to data and social media journalism training, the Academy also doubles as a centre for news innovation. Through the newsroom, we regularly experiment with different approaches to delivering content to audiences, with an emphasis on actionable news.

Code for South Africa is actively involved in ongoing projects that promote innovation in the media space through the use of data-driven storytelling and the Academy plays an important role in achieving this.

Each intake consists of up to eight working journalists and the training is aimed at helping them acquire practical data skill-sets that equip them to deliver compelling data-driven multimedia stories. The Academy team works closely with participants’ newsrooms to define a large project that supports the newsroom’s digital strategy.

The newsroom is run by an experienced data news editor, and the work the journalists produce is owned by their media houses and is fed back to their newsrooms to publish, syndicate or sell.

The programme consists of two components: an initial two-week practical course on “The fundamentals of data-driven storytelling”, followed by a four-week long project with the assistance of the in-house academy team.

In order to promote data-driven storytelling in South Africa, the course is heavily subsidised by Code for South Africa donors. The price for the course is R20,000 over the six weeks, and follow-up support is available to the journalists afterwards. The programme is run from Code for South Africa’s offices in Cape Town and media houses will be responsible for all costs of their trainees, including accommodation and transport. Financial support may be available based on merit.

For more information about the residency programme, click here.

Apply to be part of the next cohort here.

This initiative is kindly sponsored by Omidyar Network, Code for Africa, the International Center for Journalism, and the Indigo Trust.