BY LAJU ARENYEKA

It appears that the 2015 election bug seems to have caught not just Nigerian politicians, but journalists as well who are preparing ahead to give unprecedented reportage to ensure free, fair and transparent elections through the innovative use of social media.

This was obvious at the recent two-day Editors Lab Hackdays sponsored by Google and organised by Global Editors Network, GEN, in conjunction with Vanguard Newspapers.

The participants were taken first-hand on the fundamentals of Google applications such as Google search, display ads, knowledge panel, modifiers, conversion, Google scholar, Google translate, Google trends, Youtube, Google maps, Google streaming among others, by  Mr. Taiwo Kola-Ogunlade, Communications & Public Affairs Manager for Google in West Africa and Mr. Ameth Sokhna from GEN. They were later asked to develop digital tools for journalists with the focus on “New ways to cover elections online and through social media.”

Kola-Ogunlade, speaking on the rationale behind the training, said: “We usually bring together developers with people who are not developers to bring technical solutions to problems, problems that digital technology or the internet can help to solve.

“In this particular situation, it is the media, so at this event, we have different media people from different media houses brainstorming about what difference we can bring to the table with respect to reporting the 2015 elections. I’ve been pretty impressed about some of the ideas that have come up.

“The media has seen that we are no longer competing with one another as media houses, but with individuals on the street. Social media enables literally anyone to become a media person.
“How do we use social media to source for information, and how do we present such information in a way that practically anyone can understand such information.”

The team from the School of Media and Communication, Pan-Atlantic University, SMC-PAU, emerged winners of the competition for developing an application called Verifi, and will represent Nigeria at the Hackathon during the GEN Summit in Barcelona, holding from June 11 to 13.

Here they will get to share ideas people for different parts of the world about how new media is reshaping the world that we live in. Vanguard  developed an application termed Pollswatch and came second with a score of 10.15.

In the mean time, fingers are crossed in anticipation of the 2015 elections; whether or not new social media tools will play a role in changing age-old election habits remains to be seen.