Highway Africa hosted a riveting discussion about the state of community media in engaging its audience on 7 September at Eden Grove Blue.Entitled Managing Social Media: Activating the “community” in community media, the panel discussion comprised Louise Vale, Zenzele Ndebele, Rachel Chikadaya and was chaired by Melanie Beth Oliviero.
Highway Africa hosted a riveting discussion about the state of community media in engaging its audience on 7 September at Eden Grove Blue.Entitled Managing Social Media: Activating the “community” in community media, the panel discussion comprised Louise Vale, Zenzele Ndebele, Rachel Chikadaya and was chaired by Melanie Beth Oliviero.
Louise Vale, Executive Director of the Association of Independent Publishers (AIP), expressed excitement when she announced AIP’s plans to launch 50 independent publications on a pilot syndication platform, akin to a news agency like SAPA.
“30% of media conversation is by mainstream media […] and even that is not really a conversation but an exchange of abuse,” said Vale.
“We are trying to get synergy and convergence together,” she said of the project. Local service accountability monitoring application, MobiSAM and other mobile sites will be used in conjunction with SMS alerts to “bring audiences back to print for the details.”
Ndebele, who heads up Radio Dialogue in Zimbabwe, believes that social media is giving formal traction to mainstream media publications.
“We have moved to social media to crowd source. 70% of our stories come from the people,” said Ndebele.
Radio Dialogue uses Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, toll free numbers and SMS lines in an innovative way to get past strict laws in
Zimbabwe.
Chikadaya, of the Eastern Cape Communications Forum (ECCF) agreed.
“We can get citizens to interact when the media is comprehensive, true, sincerely stated and morally right,” said Chikadaya. Her work with the ECCF deals mainly with training community journalists, civil society organisations and citizens. The intention is to familiarise and provide information to individuals regarding municipal and local governance procedures. This, she believes, will fortify the robust relationship between media consumers and producers.
Various platforms of traditional community media were covered, as well as the integration of social media to enhance community usages of traditional media.
Motse Mfuleni from one of AIP’s flag-ship publications, Zithethele, spoke of the strides made in integrating broadcast (Bay TV) with
Zithethele. Because the similarities in community licensing policies, conversations via newspapers can be translated to cater for
an audio-visual audience.
“Social media is then used to broaden and expand what the traditional community media is doing,” explained Mfuleni.
The discussion served to clearly illuminate the points of intersection between traditional community media practice, and the ways in
which it integrates social media.
