OPINION: The bane of the Ghanaian Journalist; fear or laziness?

Have you ever heard that an African journalist has been kidnaped before?, That will never happen, they will never leave their Fufu and 'eba' and the comfort of their homes and offices to go to conflict areas and risk their lives just to bring the news.

So the ISIS, Alqeada and the rest will never get the head of the African journalist to gruesomely sever.

Not even 'Home Grown' terrorist groups like Boko Haram, Al-Shabaab and Janjaweed will ever have to worry that their fellow African journalist will come and investigate to tell the stories of the atrocities they commit.

If the African journalist ever wants to write about these stories all they do is to go to Aljazeera's website, or if they want a balance, check on CNN.com or the BBC to copy their stories and paste, that's it!

The only real work of the African journalist for which they will leave the office is when they follow public officers around to inspect projects or attend news conferences or sit in courtrooms and report, the latter can easily win you the Journalist of the year award in Ghana.

There are a few who go all lengths to tell us in-depth stories by posing as prisoners, cleaners in Hospitals to bring to light scandals at public institutions. Such journalists who are taking great risk to expose the shadowy wrongdoing must be celebrated.

Investigative Journalism as defined by UNESCO means the unveiling of matters that are concealed either deliberately by someone in a position of power or accidentally, behind a chaotic mass of facts and circumstances and the analysis and exposure of all relevant facts to the public.

Investigative journalism aims to uncover the truth about a particular subject, person, or event. Investigative reporters must often work with uncooperative or recalcitrant sources that do not wish to divulge information or sometimes disguise themselves mostly at the peril of their lives to unveil stories.

Renowned investigative journalists, such as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's uncovering of the Watergate scandal, affected major institutions significantly and influenced public life.

I acknowledge there are other forms of journalism practice that is, investigative journalism, news journalism, reviews, columns and feature writing, Most African Journalist prefer the News type since with that you can just copy and paste without giving credit and you are gone.

Why should I take GHS2 or GHS3 Ghana Cedis to buy a newspaper and spend hours daily to read same for which most of the news items are dead news?

Fact is, if you are an ardent follower of the news, you can be sure that most of the news items told in particularly the newspapers and Television are all not news as in it being news, because their comrades in the Radio have dissected and killed same already.

Those of us who like sports and are ardent followers of international news websites can tell that most of the news item on international sporting news segments on the press in Ghana are a rehash and some of which no credit is given both in the print and electronic media.

This is replicated in all the other fields like Science, Business, and Travel, etc.

To overcome this, Media owners and their management must build the capacity of their journalist to assess their interest and nurture them to specialize.

Also, civil society organizations can fund journalist who wants to take up the challenge.