Emilly C. Maractho (PhD)
A couple of weeks ago we sat at a meeting discussing media sustainability in Nairobi. The meeting of African Journalism Educators’ Network held at the Aga Khan University was to grapple with the ever-challenging issues in media and communication, and how educators are responding to this.
One interesting discussion was provoked by a German Journalism professor who talked about television. She titled her presentation in an interesting way. ‘TV is dead. Long live TV’.
Many of us were struck by the irony of the title. It represented the everyday struggle of wondering about the future of the old platforms and sometimes of journalism driven by innovation in technology and changes in communication. The same could have been said of newspapers, and radio today.
Sometimes we are in the middle of the deadness and life of the older platforms. Those who are quick to conclude say, they are all on the way to the grave when the facts show up. The optimists say they are here to stay.
These conversations are critical and need to keep going in various ways. Tomorrow, September 17, the African Centre for Media Excellence (ACME) will be hosting Prof Guy Berger, an independent expert and consultant on media and internet policy issues, and former UNESCO director for freedom of expression and media development. The meeting, which will be held at the Golf Course Hotel at 3 pm, is part of ACME’s efforts to return the Annual African Media Lecture.
Prof Berger is a great speaker with a wealth of knowledge on the subject. It is a wonderful opportunity to think about these things that concern the industry and its challenges. The need for innovative thinking on these things has never been greater.
I remember one of the first things we had to deal with when I joined the board of Monitor Publications Ltd was the question of the weekend editions – Saturday Monitor and Sunday Monitor not making money, with no advertising coming in. The question was how to keep it going, and if shutting it down was not the right thing.
We were told that there was little to be done, advertisers are not coming for the weekend editions and it is extremely costly to keep the paper going. Our visible and plausible options were to shut down, go completely online or merge the editions into one copy. My heart was broken. I went home demoralised. This is not how I had envisioned starting my contribution to journalism at Nation Media Group.
I asked the board to give the editorial team time to think through the issues. None of those options seemed appealing to me. I could not imagine not having a Sunday Monitor, for instance. We then started engaging on these issues at a deeper level, asking ourselves what more we could do. We all agreed that shutting down, merging the editions or going entirely online were the options in the box, but we could also discard the whole box and keep going.
Our first option was to tell the stories differently, try to get people to make room for journalism, the media products we offer and respond to those things we felt the market was telling us. The editorial team started experimenting with things. And we have seen a response to this approach make some of us fall even deeper in love with journalism as we knew it. The journalists are working harder than before, and everyone is benefitting.
We are tired of being called the enemy of development and turned our focus on great development stories. Some of those stories many of us thought could not make the DM cover, like HIV/Aids, diabetes or even sickle cell disease, are finding their way up the ranks to the top stories of the day, not hidden away in supplements or pullouts. Opinion pieces tackling public health or mental health are now commonplace and gratifying.
Without losing sight of the political stories of the day, the journalists are telling us, all stories matter and can be told intelligently and interestingly. And we cannot thank the journalists enough, for their creativity. It surely gladdens the heart.
We could say the same thing, except that ‘journalism is dead’ or refuse to accept that and declare, ‘long live journalism’. Great journalists learn early on, that the people they cover and the stories they tell are more important than those who tell these stories. Journalism has, history tells us, had the ability to defy or transcend platform dilemmas of the day. It has traditionally required standing up to the bullies. But now it needs much more, for people to intentionally make room for it.
The best way to celebrate journalism and the journalists behind these stories that for the Daily Monitor the public has increasingly been recognising is to make room for their products in our lives. Great journalism is worth standing up for.
Great journalists have made their name, not by the money in their pockets, but by the sheer confidence and courage to stand up to the bullies. The challenges we face now may bully us into giving up, but that should never be on the table in the first place.
Ms Emilly Comfort Maractho (PhD) is an academic.
