By Alpha Media Holdings Group Editor in Chief Vincent Kahiya
Salutations
We gather here this evening for the 2015 Bornwell Chakaodza Memorial Lecture as part of commemorations for World Press Freedom Day. I am honoured to stand before you in memory of a fine journalist, a political scientist and a witty mentor man who played a significant part in my career development.
I had the honour to interact with Bornwell from way back in 1991 when he was my media studies lecturer.
Our close relationship developed from then on in the mid-90s in our brief interaction at Linquenda House where he had become Director of Information. Our careers later took different paths as Bornwell joined Zimpapers while I joined the private media for a brief stint at Modus Publications and later at Zimind Publishers.
Fate had it that we would be united again at Zimind where Bornwell was to edit the Standard in 2002. Upon my appointment as Editor of the Zimbabwe Independent in 2004 BC cautioned: “Vince, there, there is no time for festivities. You are now an editor and should behave like a grown-up man.”
I grew up fast in the face of an onslaught on the media when arrests were common. In May 2002 Bornwell was arrested three times in one week; a record I want to caution editors not to try and break. The hospitality as a guest of the state is not often pleasant. I know the experience!
The arrests did not break him. He continued to use the pen to protest media repression and to point out flaws among the ruling elites.
I shared Bornwell’s dream which he clearly espoused in one of his columns in the Financial Gazette in 2007. He wrote: “I dream of the day when we will no longer have words such as repressive media environment and draconian media laws on our lips.”
Unfortunately ladies and gentlemen, those words are not disappearing fast. The environment is far for the perfect Nirvana Bornwell dreamt of. We meet as journalists today under a cloud following the alleged abduction and disappearance of Itai Dzamara. He has been missing since March 9 and his disappearance is another dark stain on Zimbabwe’s media canvass. We will continue to pray for his safe return to his family.
We should not relent in our fight for fundamental rights including media freedom. We remain cognisant of the need to align a raft of media laws to the Constitution in order to open up the democratic space in the country. The long-in-coming IMPI report was handed to Government in March and we wait with bated breaths on the way forward as an industry.
In the process of putting together this paper, I was also alive to the professionalism deficit in the practice of journalism and the need to develop a cadre of reporters who provide useful information for the reader to make informed decisions in key aspects of life. These issues are captured in the IMPI Report together with critical recommendations to remedy issues of media law and regulation, professionalism, training, viability and; inference and polarisation among other subjects. These are subjects that have remained outstanding and remedies are more urgent today as different pressures have emerged to compound an already precarious position in the media.
Today, allow me ladies and gentlemen to focus on the broader issue of the changes happening around us, which have an impact on the viability of the industry and which require our urgent attention.
I seek to address in this lecture the growth in what I want to term new journalism and the fast-changing media environment brought about by technology.
Ladies and gentlemen these are scary times for the media, especially for newspaper veterans throughout the world. Hardly a day goes by without news about disappearing readers, shrinking revenues, or looming layoffs and media businesses going under. Closer to home, the shock waves can no longer be ignored. We are in the middle of it all. We have new players in our space and we can only ignore their influence at our own peril.
Let me use a recent simple matter to dramatise this phenomenon. A picture of a man in shorts posing for a photo with a newly-wed couple recently went viral on Whatsapp. It jumped onto Facebook and suddenly the huge interest spurred inventive chaps to create memes and caricatures of this gentleman. Overnight, social media had created its own hero. Readers had created their own pictorial news source and started to tell their stories about the fellow in shorts.
Mainstream news media, fixated with the story of xenophobia and the Sadc Summit could only look with envy at this new hero in shorts and not a suit and a red tie.
Mainstream news media had no choice but to search for this man in shorts to make him the subject of a story.
The moral of this story is enthralling and rather sad. Readers can create their own heroes. They can create their own subjects of discourse and formulate a news agenda from issues that traditional media do not necessarily consider to be news. If readers believe that mainstream media are boring, they can create their own content and distribute it. They can reedit, repackage and worse still refocus content from mainstream media and distribute to their own channels.
This is the time to seriously consider the impact of citizen journalism on the media landscape. With mobile phones becoming ubiquitous there is a new explosion of voices that don’t necessarily relate to journalism traditions.
It is no longer business as usual in the media industry. This is an era of disruptive change, a phenomenon that is not unique just to the media industry but a big transformative force in other industries such as retail, airlines and entertainment. It is a major interruption that is here to stay and has already started to eat our lunch!
Our capacity to deal with disruption will determine the extent to which traditional media will survive going forward. Perhaps let me deal with the definition of disruption by way of a brief anecdote.
Disruption for a start is not the same as innovation. Take a look at the music industry. When the Compact Disc (CD) came along, it was huge innovation but it was not disruptive. Record companies simply changed the machinery for production and put in new racks in shops. This was sustained innovation. The industry kept the same market, structure and distribution channels. But iTunes was a huge disruption because it killed presses, dismantled distribution channels and music shops ceased to exist.
Our media industry is at the innovative stage. We have built websites, apps and newsletters as part of innovation. The investment in these new channels has been huge but the returns have been inadequate if not negligible. Traditional media in Zimbabwe have clung to these innovations and have generally shied away from disruptive models. The history of business is one of incumbents being displaced by disruptive newcomers.
Current online business models have generally replicated the print models; relying on display advertisements and classifieds, instead of creating new business models. These new online advertisers often require different ad metrics than those traditionally used in print media.
Ladies and gentlemen, I believe that the media industry in Zimbabwe can take advantage of the disruptive force to grow the industry.
The value proposition is still there and is strong. There is better organisational aptitude in mainstream media but speed is lacking. The nimbler start-ups are still playing on the fringes but they will be entering the fray soon. The incursion is building up. Have we ever tried to forecast where 263Chat will be in two years’ time?
This is the time to carefully study emerging industry experiments, new products and business models. We need to point our way towards future success instead of being forced into prescriptive prototypes from elsewhere. Industry players must be primed to disrupt themselves and to get it right.
Allow me to quote here from BC’s 1989 Zimbabwe Institute of Development Studies paper titled: Communication policies in the African Context: Towards and Operational and Conceptual Framework. He said: “For it is only when Africa begins to define her own problems and find her own solutions to those problems that a new order of information and communication shall come about.”
We cannot as the media industry laugh off disruptors as a fad that will evaporate with time. Worldwide, the disruptors are on the march and industry is already hurting.
As I speak, there are loud rumours of a local cellular phone company entering the media space as a content aggregator. Technology companies are interested in digital radio and television. Worldwide, corporates are moving into the content creation space, with Red Bull and Guinness leading from the front.
The growth in mobile news consumption has brought in telecoms services providers into the news space. They own a bigger clientele base but they do not have content. In revenue share negotiations with media houses, the telecoms firms hold sway because of the technology they have to take content to millions of readers. This is disruptive but co-operation with them is better than competition.
Traditional media’s share of revenues is under brutal attack and with it the ability to serve the public interest is also diminishing.
It is therefore worth taking note of these trends:
• Radio will be game-changer in the media industry. People will listen to radio on their phones. Radio is still the primary source of news in Africa. Radio remains the most downloaded application on smartphones, according to the ITU.
• News on mobile is good business;
• There is greater promotion of goods and products on social media – Social media marketing is replacing the old models of media houses offering paid ad spaces to brands;
• Non-news players are leading the charge in social media marketing, (notwithstanding their much lower social media stats compared to mainstream media);
• News media are breaking news on their websites and social media platforms and;
• Print has started to curate content from citizen journalists, expert writers and social media.
The discourse on the future and sustainability of the media industry should start now. The cherished norms of creating a free and independent media culture must now incorporate how practitioners, our audiences and advertisers can cope with the major industry disruptions.
Ladies and gentlemen, as Austrian thinker Viktor Frankl once opined: “When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”
Therefore following closely in the footsteps of Chris Chinaka sobering paper last year on leadership, Zimbabwean media space should start to develop media captains who think in a disruptive way; men and women who can stare disruption in the face and say bring it on.
We must work with new players in the game instead of trying to out-compete them. We need win-win partnerships with technology firms and start-ups. We need to change at the same pace with advertisers and accommodate citizen journalists into our space.
Protecting the act of Journalism
As we go through this rough yet interesting transformation, we must not lose sight of the fact that Journalism must thrive at the end of the day. As more people commit the act of journalism, the lines between who is,and who is not a journalist get fuzzier and the distinction becomes less useful.
We have started to see news organisations collaborating and crowdsourcing with their audiences and communities. But what protection if any do we afford these citizen collaborators.
Our understanding of journalism is changing and so should our understanding of press freedom. We are no longer alone in this quest for media freedom. Our readers are no longer just consumers. They are participants; they are writers, editors and moderators. They will in the long run share our pain. We have in our newsrooms fall back positions and defence funds to assist journalists in trouble. How do we incorporate the new citizen journalist into the matrix?
Much more troubling however is the fact as the use of technology has opened up the media space, it has also afforded state players a cheaper and more extensive platform for surveillance and intrusion. Our government’s appetite in this area led to the enactment of the Interception of Communication legislation. I am sure there is more happening behind the scenes as big eyes continue to search for intelligence data.
This is the time for new efforts to strengthen press freedom protection. In this climate, it no longer makes sense for press freedom protection to apply to the narrow class of professional journalists. We need to push for the protection of these new entrants. This is no longer about protecting the journalist but protecting the act of journalism.
The industry has a role to lead the process of advocating for laws to protect the practice of journalism. Failure to do so is an open invitation for statutory control and regulation. Imagine state controls on ordinary citizens’ rights to express themselves.
The role of the Voluntary Media Council of Zimbabwe in this is critical from not only a regulatory standpoint but in media education. It is now more imperative than ever that the general public understand their rights as communicators of information and as citizen reporters and bloggers.
There must be a concerted campaign for the public to understand that Freedom of the Media and Freedom of expression are universal rights belonging to all as espoused in the UN Human Rights Council 2012 Resolution on the Promotion, Protection and Enjoyment of Human Rights on the Internet.
According to The Online Media Handbook on Self-Regulation, these rights apply to all media forms be it online, in print or broadcasting. These rights must be enjoyed by all practitioners; whether professional, citizen journalist, blogger or the village crier.
Media education should therefore clearly bring out the notion that these rights are not given the narrow interpretation only in the context of traditional media.
The rights apply to all journalistic work that is meant for public distribution.
More critically, as this is a basic human right, there is no room for different standards between traditional media and the new disruptive media. I am alive to the fact a lot of content creators online favour anonymity and pseudonymity . But good editorial quality requires accountability; a notion being actively pursued by the VMCZ.
A digest of the 2014 complaints dealt with by the VMCZ shows that they all emanated from stories published or broadcast in the traditional media. That is not to say that all is well with citizen journalists and bloggers. Work is coming to you gentlemen and ladies hence the urgent need toreach out to the public to explain rights under the digital age.
Let me end here with another quotation from BC’s 1989 paper: He said: “Democratisation of Communication and democratisation of society are of course interdependent. They are variables of the same reality. To democratise communication therefore means to democratise society and vice-versa .
Let journalism thrive in this disruptive digital age.
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