This was a performance by a talented young man named Iziba. His song was about climate change, as this was one of the themes for our community journalism training program. Enjoy!

On Sunday, we had the closing ceremony of the Community Journalism Program, which I have written about here. We had some community journalists, as well as many members of the communities in which USAID COMET II and NIA work. The turnout was “oversubscribed,” as one organizer put it, but the day went very well. We presented each of the nine pieces that were published or will be published, and discussed them with a panel, which included the NIA’s legal advisor, gender specialist Nadeen Spence, a youth activist and Rodje Malcolm of Jamaicans for Justice. And it seems another round of training will be underway at some point, as many new faces in the room expressed an interest in participating in learning how to be an investigative journalist.

Here is our next story from the Community Journalism training program, which ran in today’s Jamaica Observer.

Sunset footballs game at the University of Technology. The games last night drew quite a crowd.

Nature’s construction is amazing. I’ve been thinking about that watching the coverage of the devastation wrought by the hurricanes in the Caribbean. Jamaica has been lucky, other islands, not so. Thoughts and prayers are with the people who lost everything. Nature will rebuild itself, humanity will take longer.

A fascinating piece about the Irish origins in Jamaica, check it out here.

The semester is underway. Most administrative duties, at least to transition to full-time, have been cleared up. And more students have started showing up to class. They seem eager to learn as we discuss the fundamentals of journalism. Today we discussed ledes and news story structures.

Over the course of the summer, Global Reporters of the Caribbean founder Zahra Burton and I, along with six other journalism mentors, trained 30 Jamaicans to be investigative journalists as part of a project with National Integrity Action (NIA) and USAID COMET II. It was a long and difficult, but very rewarding, process. The stories are starting to be published now, some print, radio and television. This is one of them, by one of my Utech students, Alayne Richards. We are very proud!

The Internet is often inoperable at Utech, where I teach. The students say this is normal. Administration says the same and that it is due to a lack of funds. It makes it difficult to teach some classes, especially those that centre around the Internet. And makes posting this blog impossible some days, as I am on campus almost all day. Hopefully it will be fixed soon.

Why do newspapers and journalists gravitate towards bad news? This is a question I have pondered a lot. It is also a question that comes up amongst my students. And a comment on my blog yesterday from Dennis Jones…

So, we ask, is this a common occurrence but not much reported, especially with evidence, or is it a rarity? Do the media focus on negative not positive stories?

It seems social media was happy with the Gleaner’s cover page yesterday, which celebrated a young man who saved a boy’s life. The boy was nearly washed away in a swollen gully. The young man has now been offered a job.

Amidst so much horrifying news, both locally and internationally, people are thirsting for good news. So why does the media rarely publish good news stories, at least in the perception of readers?

Bad news alerts people to things that should be fixed or changed. Bad news shows people what could be improved upon. Bad news tends to try to hold people accountable and to demand change. At least this is my theory. More simply, people gravitate to sensational news. They are voyeurs and the news caters to that. Those are some quick thoughts on a morning I am headed off to teach said students.