At the outset, it is essential to recognize that citizen journalism comes in many forms, which makes it rather difficult to prescribe a training method for the practice. But, there is no shred of a doubt that with a little training, a citizen journalist can greatly improve the quality of whatever story they seek to tell, whether it’s through writing, video, audio, or photography.

First things first: a citizen journalist as the term suggests should strive to enhance civic engagement and participation. A citizen journalist needs to therefore train him or herself to have the right attitude that can contribute to the growth of the practice as well as expanding the rights of citizenship.

To train yourself as a citizen journalist, you have to understand what you are up for first, that is, to produce content that is trustworthy, fair and accurate. Citizen journalism is more than just stitching content together predicated by self-interest.

A citizen journalist needs to appreciate that whatever they produce must be credible, and is not intended to cause social harm. That way, a citizen journalist can effectively contribute to the greater conversation, thereby expanding human horizons.

As an aspiring citizen journalist, a key step in your training is to have a clear understanding of what is involved with the practice.

In a groundbreaking study of citizen media titled “Citizen Media: Fad or the Future of News”, J-Lab: The Institute of Journalism describes citizen journalism as “a form of bridge media, linking traditional forms of journalism with classic civic participation.”

While a citizen journalist aspires to report on a community, more importantly, they must strive to write on issues that provide better and unbiased insight into issues.

You must therefore train yourself to have an awareness of issues that affect whatever community that you seek to present.

In that respect, an awareness of the principles and models of traditional journalism can greatly help a citizen journalist to write with an eye to accuracy, truth and fairness.

However, you must not shy away from sharing your thoughts, observations, ideas and experiences of what you encounter.

Having said that, a citizen journalist must strive to be interested in providing analysis to their observations to ensure that what is purveyed is not mere stereotype. You must make a serious effort to remain independent of political, gender, cultural, or tribal biases.

By remaining free of biases, a citizen journalist is better positioned to tell the whole story without compromising the truth or inhibiting the freedom of expression.

In addition, training oneself to have an eye of facts is highly critical to lend credibility to content. But a citizen journalist needs to be able to see that facts do not always tell the whole story, and can easily be fabricated.

Thus, a citizen journalist strives to look beyond the facts, and question the story behind them.

Another essential key to self-training is to always conduct in-depth research on issues. The web, the biggest library known to humanity, offers a citizen journalist a great tool to be able to conduct research on a chosen subject.

It is the duty of the citizen journalist to sift through the facts, and compile a story that is credible. Research helps to make the story better.

Overall, a citizen journalist must be consciously aware that he or she is responsible for the transmission of ideas and knowledge. Responsibility requires being able to check facts, write truthfully as well as standing by the story if any questions are raised.

To respond effectively to the growing epidemics of AIDS and TB around the world, a strategy for communicating messages that influence change of individual behavior, community attitudes and socio-political dynamics is absolutely critical.

In order to make communication effective, there is a need to fully and rigorously understand the audiences, including contextual factors (political, cultural, economic, gender etc.) that determine the health choices people make.

The underlying factor is that communication does not occur within a vacuum, and thus it is essential to be aware of elements that may deter effective communication in the design, distribution and measurement of AIDS or TB messages.

Communication that saves people’s lives, improves health and enhances well being is about ideas, creativity, research, knowledge and money. Given the fact that resources are finite, strategic communication needs to consciously build upon existent social capital to ensure sustainability of processes.

Strategic communication can help to shape context and build relationships that enhance the achievement of objectives to respond effectively to AIDS and TB.

To be effective, strategic communicators must understand attitudes and cultures, respect the importance of ideas, adopt advanced information technologies, and employ sophisticated communication skills and strategies. To be persuasive, they must be credible.

More importantly, strategic communication for better health appreciates what works scientifically combined with flexibility to adapt it to specific cultural contexts.

As already stated, it should go beyond simply addressing individual behaviour to structural and institutional realities that are largely responsible for driving diseases and epidemics. In many ways, public policies tend to be responsible for social and health inequalities and cannot be ignored in the communication process.

Therefore, an effective communication strategy puts people and structural realities at its heart in the design, development, implementation and evaluation of messages.

In essence, strategic communication for better health needs to be informed by a process that identifies behaviours and attitudes, identifies policy priorities, and embarks on a process to influence a broad section of society through appropriate themes and messages.

In that respect, communication is not an end goal, but rather a means to influence dialogue and engagement through relevant mediums.

Labouring over which medium to choose when targeting a specific audience is a critical component in the communication for health process. In many ways, the medium defines the message in as much as does the target audience. A chosen medium has its limitations, and key messages and themes have to be aligned to the limitations of the medium to ensure effective message delivery. Obviously, the research-based needs of a target audience determine what delivery mechanisms to utilize.

It is important to know at the outset what goal seeks to be achieved with the particular choice of a medium so that the measurements of success or failure are specified.

Events, activities, messages, and materials must be designed with your objectives, audiences, partnerships and resources clearly in place. Building a communication strategy is about directing and focusing evidence-based messages and themes according to clearly defined pathways to achieve intended objectives.

The process of strategically positioning communication needs to ensure the participation of intended beneficiaries in the designing of messages, no matter what the level of focus.

Strategic communications shifts away from communicating to, and instead focuses on communicating with target groups in order to establish solutions., with emphasis being on how to build a relationship that allows for communication to take place so that appropriate action is taken. In that sense it is a significant shift from the magic bullet theory of communication which treats audiences as inactive recipients of messages.

Fact-based communication research is necessary for demonstrating and validating the need for resources required to increase the impact of communication. It is also essential that message platform for key initiatives are identified through the research process.

According to Wikipedia, “strategic communication provides a conceptual umbrella that enables organizations to integrate their disparate messaging efforts”. In other words, it enables organizations to “create and distribute communications that, while different in style and purpose, have an inner coherence”.

New media offers a significant opportunity to unify organizational health communications in order to achieve that inner coherence which is often times based on the vision, mission, goals and values of the organization.

New media offer an opportunity to encourage conversation and promote collaboration in creating appropriate messages. It is essential to integrate social media into the communication infrastructure and tap into its potential to create dialogue and reach a wide audience. New media make it easier and faster to communicate and collaborate, and essential element to public health communications.

The ability of new information tools to alter the way we communicate needs to be tapped into but as with any component of the health communication process the focus must be on people and not just the technology.

Overall, a strategic communication process needs to be planned, directed, coordinated, funded, measured and conducted in ways that promote the wellbeing of individual in a manner that aligns with organizational values and goals.