My Personal experience from Campus Reporter’s Campus Journalism Clinic by Chrispin Agyekum

There’s a particular energy in a room full of student journalists; the kind of curiosity that doesn’t wait to be invited. That was the atmosphere at the Centre for Journalism Innovation and Development (CJID) this week, where students from Communication Studies, Psychology, Economics, Political Science and several other disciplines spent two days in the same conference room, drawn together by one thing: a love for journalism.

The Campus Journalism Clinic ran from Tuesday, 21 July to Wednesday, 22 July, 2026, and it didn’t feel like a typical training workshop. Over the two days, participants moved through Campus Journalism, Investigative Journalism, Fact-Checking, Journalism Ethics, Data Journalism, Gender-Sensitive Reporting, Storytelling, and Multimedia Storytelling.

You’d expect a room of opinionated young journalists to get a little unruly. Instead, it became something closer to a working model of good journalism itself: people disagreeing respectfully, asking hard questions, actually listening to each other. The facilitators kept things loose and funny without losing substance, and that combination is probably why the sessions felt more like conversations than lectures.

What people left with mattered more than what they wrote down. 

I have always struggled with storytelling; not for lack of ideas, but because newsrooms have trained the creativity out of me. “That’s not our style,” editors used to tell me. “Break the news as quickly as you can.” After enough of that, my writing turned mechanical: accurate, competent, and flat. 

But academic researcher and LSE Fellow Solomon Katachie’s storytelling session cracked something open for me. I walked out with a conviction that journalism and narrative aren’t opposites, and set myself a goal — five stories written in the kebab storytelling style before the year is out.

Mabel Yeboah had a different kind of realization. As an Economics student, she’d assumed journalism was territory reserved for communications majors. By the end of the clinic, she saw it differently: her grasp of data, markets and policy wasn’t adjacent to journalism; it was a way into it.

The Chief Executive Officer of CJID, Dapo Olorunyomi, opened day one with a session on campus journalism, followed by Investigative Journalism, which delved into both the appeal and the challenges of chasing hard stories. The day wrapped with Fact-Checking, with tea and lunch breaks giving people room actually to talk to each other and swap contacts.

Day two started with Data Journalism, a look at how numbers can carry a story most people would otherwise miss, then moved into Gender-Sensitive Reporting, a session that pushed participants to think harder about how they represent the people in their stories. Storytelling and Multimedia Storytelling closed things out, a fitting way to end given how much of journalism now lives across formats.

By the time we packed up and traded numbers, it was clear nobody was leaving with just a notebook full of notes. We were leaving with a different sense of what journalism could be, and for a lot of us, this wasn’t just a two-day clinic. It was a starting point.