Regional Media houses have been tipped by KAS (Konrad Adenauer Stiftung) incorporate bloggers and new media practitioners in newsrooms . The Director of the well known German Political Foundation- Konrad Adenauer Stiftung (KAS) Sub-Sahara Africa Media Programme, Mr Frank Windeck said this in Dar es Salaam on Monday. He noted that there was an increase in information channeled through community media aka blogs by the so called- ‘citizen journalists’.
”The question of whether these new media are a threat to traditional media or not is still discussable but their influence in information dissemination is enormous, it is becoming a more popular source of information that we can not ignore,” he added. He though, noted that media houses should first make sure that they are good in content and doing better in the market, adding that going high tech alone would not help much in survival if other factors are not observed.
Frank was speaking when he openned the 9th Africa Media Leadership Conference which kicked off on Monday at Dar es Salaam International Conference Centre (DICC) and is expected to close today. The theme was; ‘Sustainable Media Business Models in the Digital Age’. The conference organized by KAS brought together media leaders from around Africa.
The funny contribution on the subject came from Kenyan Director of Special Projects and Broadcasting, Communications Commission of Kenya (CCK) Mr Francis Wangusi who called on governments to “intervene on the contents in the blogs in order to ascertain editorial responsibility on social media”. Now that is sick to me. Very backward idea. Anyway it would be very interesting to see how we can control blogs.
”Blogging as a category of social media, is a beautiful, nice and very challenging media channel, however, there should be a deliberate move to ensure that people are media literate”, Mr Wangusi.
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