By Joyce Jura
The International Association of Women in Radio and Television – Kenya (IAWRT-Kenya) is midway through a seven-month national training programme aimed at equipping female journalists with practical skills in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and digital tools for modern newsrooms.
The initiative, which kicked off in August and takes place every third Friday of the month, is supported by SIDA, the Association for Progressive Communications (APC) and in collaboration with the Kenya Correspondents Association (KCA) and Google. It targets women journalists across Kenya, with the goal of improving digital literacy, newsroom efficiency and resilience in the fast-changing media landscape.
According to IAWRT-Kenya, the programme is designed to ensure that “female journalists are not just consumers of technology, but empowered storytellers shaping its use responsibly.”
The first three modules were led by Kenneth Kiunga from Google News Initiative. The first module covered Gemini, second one covered NotebookLM and the third one covered Pinpoint.
MODULE 1: Understanding AI and Journalism
Fellows explored how AI is reshaping content creation, fact-checking, newsroom workflows and audience engagement, with examples drawn from both global and African newsrooms.
The session also addressed ethical implications of AI in journalism and walked participants through practical use cases in reporting, editing and content creation.
A key segment focused on crafting high-quality prompts, especially for tools like Gemini, where participants learned to define audiences, assign roles, set clear tasks, provide context and specify output formats.
“Knowing how to prompt will save you a lot of time and determine the results because the quality of output depends on the quality of the prompt,” said Kiunga.
MODULE 2: Using NotebookLM for Research and Reporting
In the second module, Kiunga trained participants on Google’s NotebookLM, an AI-powered research and note-taking tool integrated with Gemini models.
NotebookLM enables journalists to upload their own documents, stories, transcripts, audios, reports and PDFs, and get AI-generated insights grounded in those materials. This reduces reliance on open-web data and lowers the risk of hallucinations.
Participants learned how NotebookLM can support research organisation, summarisation, document synthesis and workflow efficiency.
IAWRT-Kenya reiterated that such tools are crucial in bridging the digital divide in newsrooms and empowering women journalists with next-generation digital skills.
MODULE 3: Investigative Research with Google Pinpoint
The third training session introduced journalists to Google Pinpoint, a powerful AI-driven tool for investigative reporting.
Pinpoint allows users to upload and analyse large collections of documents, including audio, emails, images, scanned PDFs and handwritten files. It provides:
– Extensive search capability across entire document sets
– Automatic transcription of audio and video
– Data extraction into sortable spreadsheets
– Entity recognition for names, locations and organisations
– Generative AI summaries to highlight key themes
Participants learned how Pinpoint helps journalists “find the needle in the haystack” and drastically reduce time spent on manual research.
MODULE 4: AI in Multimedia Storytelling
Led by: Josephine Karani (Chairperson, IAWRT-Kenya)
The fourth session explored the use of AI in multimedia journalism, an increasingly essential skill in today’s digital news ecosystem.
Karani defined the theme as the use of “machine learning algorithms, automation tools, and intelligent systems to assist or perform tasks in news gathering, content creation, editing, and distribution across digital platforms.”
Journalists were trained on:
– Image generation using DALL·E, Canva and Midjourney
– Effective prompting for images
– Image enhancement and restoration
– Data visualization tools such as Datawrapper
– Image and video fact-checking tools
– AI for audio journalism, including transcription and translation
– Ethical considerations when using AI tools in news production
With three more sessions still to go, the training program is already strengthening digital capacity and confidence among women journalists across Kenya.
IAWRT-Kenya states that tools like NotebookLM and Pinpoint are redefining how journalists handle information and produce stories.
“The future of journalism isn’t AI replacing humans, it’s AI empowering truth-tellers,” Karani said.
