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Journalism in Africa: Rwandan journalists protest new law; Kenya’s media voted most trustworthy institution

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Rwanda

Rwandan journalists have officially petitioned their upper parliament to shoot down a stringent media law that would force journalists to reveal their sources.

The proposed law would criminalize any story on cabinet proceedings, internal memos and documents in public institutions.

Under the legislation, anyone starting a newspaper would be required to pay $20,000 (£12,500) and 10 times more to begin a radio or TV station.

Speaking to Journalism.co.uk, Gasper Safari, president of the Rwanda Journalists Association, said the new laws were a death sentence to investigative journalism.

“How will investigative journalism survive? It is a rope and we are just being asked to practice journalism and the hangman will pull the rug under your feet,” he said.

Safari explained how his organisation had initially written a protest letter to the lower house of parliament, but it was ignored.

“We will explore other methods in dealing with the upper house. People cannot be allowed to shout they support press freedom while deep down they do not support the existence of the media,” he said.

Kenya

The media is the most trusted institution in Kenya – and the country’s electoral commission (ECK) the least, according to a recent survey by Gallup International affiliates Steadman Research.

The quarterly poll found that 80 per cent of Kenyans trusted the media – exactly the same number that found the ECK the most dishonest.

Fortunes for the media and the ECK have been on a downward trend since the violence surrounding last year’s disputed presidential election, but the media has regained some ground in the last two months after two major commissions backed by both the United Nations (UN) and the African Union (AU) returned a not guilty verdict on most of the media.

“Kenyans are saying that their last hope is with the media, their trust for institutions is at an all time low, but they have their thumbs up for journalists,” Tom Wolf, a lead researcher at Steadman, told a press conference in Nairobi.

The media was placed ahead of Kenya’s President, Prime Minister and parliament by the survey.

“We are not very happy to be ahead of all other institutions. It means we have a duty to assist them in getting to the highest level of trust, but our work is easier since we have the trust of our readers and viewers,” said Martin Gitau, general secretary of the Journalist Association of Kenya (JAK).

So was it the ‘Blogs Wot Won It’ for Barack?

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So it doesn’t need saying that US Election 2008 took place in a very different media climate from the one experienced in 2004: just take a look at CNN à la 2004, and CNN right now.

It’s hard to actually think back and remember that four years ago the focus for many of this year’s online followers was still on the TV screen.

Last night we followed live-streams. We Twittered. We traced maps. We enjoyed striking homepage designs as the results came in.

This was the year for multimedia to really come into its own. The public outside the electoral college had a chance to participate from afar. Many bloggers might not have had a vote, but they could be influential: by spreading round a Sarah Palin debate flow-chart, casting a vote on a remote voting map, or putting a supporting button onto their sites (the online version of the rosette).

MercuryNews.com gave these, as the ninth and tenth reasons for McCain’s defeat:

9. “The Internet. Obama broke an earlier pledge and opted out of public financing, allowing him to raise at least $200 million in September and October, in millions of donations averaging $86. He raised more than twice as much money as McCain, and was able to pay for staff and ads in states and in numbers that McCain could only dream about. His 30-minute infomercial six days before the election drew more than 34 million viewers — more people than watched the finale of ‘American Idol’ last year or the final game of the World Series.”

10. “Better ground game. Obama mobilized young people and used technology, from text messages to internet meet-ups, in ways that built the first truly 21st century campaign. It might have brought guffaws at the GOP Convention, but it turns out that being a ‘community organizer’ is a good skill to have when running a presidential campaign.”

Obama’s campaign page thanks the various efforts of his internet supporters, links to his mobile content, and shows where you can find ‘Obama everywhere’:

Facebook Black Planet
MySpace Faithbase
YouTube Eons
Flickr Glee
Digg MiGente
Twitter MyBatanga
Eventful Asian Ave
LinkedIn DNC PartyBuilder

And what about the negative effect for McCain? You may have your reservations about this story, but Fox News reported in July how McCain supporters could have been hijacked through spam reports to Google Blogger, prompting a Republican blogger move over to WordPress.

Renee Feltz, over at the Columbia Journalism Review, looks in detail at whether McCain was ‘blogged down in the past’ with ‘top-down internet tactics’, which left him unable to keep up with Obama’s social networking strategy.

This diagram shows the online blog cluster:

(screenshot, courtesy of Morningside Analytics via CJR)

Feltz describes how the map “shows a ‘halo’ of about 500 relatively new blogs in two isolated clusters. One cluster includes several hundred anti-Obama blogs (orange) and the other contains several hundred pro-McCain and pro-Palin blogs (green).”

Their isolation shows that they are not well-connected to political blogs with the longer histories, a point which John Kelly, Morningside’s chief scientist and an affiliate of the Berkman Center, explains on the CJR post.

Please do add your own Obama bloggin’ thoughts here. Was is the blogs, and which ones, which gave Obama strength? And what should we expect on the multimedia horizon for 2012?

Citizen journalism website Helium.com secures $17m investment

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Citizen journalism site Helium.com has secured $17millon in funding. According to a press release from businesswire.com, the financial backing is from an international group of investors led by Signature Capital LLC.

“Helium‘s unique platforms put the power of citizen engagement behind media publications, enabling them to engage readers in a way that will help grow audiences and increase reader loyalty,“ said Bill Turner, principal of Signature Capital, in the release.

“With Helium.com, we are bringing our financial resources to further accelerate this growth in citizen journalism, and to support Helium‘s objectives towards providing solutions to newspapers at a time when budgets are shrinking and ad revenues are down.“

The site currently has a community of over 150,000 writers covering subjects from politics to pets and sport to science. The website’s terms have recently been changed to promote higher quality content. The changes include allowing ‘starred writers’ to receive payment upfront for new articles.

Blogging scholarship: $10,000 to fund your studies in the US

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Student bloggers should take note of this one:  College Scholarships.org are giving away a $10,000 scholarship prize to a student blogger.

But before potential applicants get too excited, here’s the requirements you need to meet:

  • ‘Your blog must contain unique and interesting information about you and/or things you are passionate about.’
  • You must be U.S. citizen or permanent resident.
  • You must be currently attending full-time in post-secondary education in the United States.
  • If you win, you must be willing to allow the organisation to list your name and blog on their page.

Important dates:

  • Accepting submissions: October 15 2008
  • Submission deadline: October 30 2008

Full details here.

WAN Amsterdam: Digital will account for 43 per cent of newspaper advertising growth by 2012 according to PricewaterhouseCoopers

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The global leader for the entertainment and media practice, at PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP in Hong Kong, Marcel Fenez, argued that ‘traditional media isn’t dead’ on the last day of the WAN/World Editors Forum 11th Readership Conference (information courtesy of WAN conference updates).

The latest media and entertainment industry forecast from PricewaterhouseCoopers predicts that global newspaper advertising will grow 2.9 per cent to 136.8 billion dollars in 2012, with digital advertising accounting for 43 per cent of the growth.

  • Print advertising will grow 1.8 per cent to 123.3 billion dollars worldwide in 2012
  • Digital advertising will grow 19.3 per cent to 13.4 billion dollars:
  • While the growth rate for digital advertising will continue its impressive rise over the next five years, the total in 2012 will represent only 10 per cent of total print and digital newspaper advertising.

“Some people say that traditional media is dead. Well, it isn’t. For the next five years, it ain’t gonna be,” he said. “The death of traditional media is exaggerated, at least in a 5-year context.”

Fenez said the forecasts, based on consumer and industry sources, does not take into account the recent economic meltdown, which could have a negative impact on the figures.

Fenez reported:

  • The generation that comes of age in 2012 will be the first that doesn’t know the pre-internet world. “We hear a lot about user generated content from the ‘net generation’. It’s very, very, very important. But premium content is still really valuable. Even the net generation values premium content. They’re tired of watching videos of a dog running up a tree.”
  • Advertisers will take a ‘wait and see’ attitude and be cautious about spending in the first half of 2009. “They won’t do anything until mid-year. If they have the revenue, they’ll release their budgets.”
  • Video games advertising is set to grow 17 per cent to 2012, though the revenue is still negligible. Most of the money being spent on game advertising is coming from television.
  • “We’re on a journey of transition from traditional to digital: the first to probably go totally digital is the music industry. In 2011, the majority of revenues will be digital.”

Reuters: UK online ads up 21 per cent despite fall in overall ad market

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The UK internet advertising spend is up 21 per cent, although the overall advertising market went down. The Internet Advertising Bureau said yesterday that expenditure on the web went up to 1.68 billion pounds ($2.95 billion) in the first six months of the year, while the total advertising market was down 0.7 percent year on year.

Blogs make money and live long lives: Technorati’s 2008 report

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Blogs can make money, and are not distinct from mainstream media, is the verdict of the first instalment of the Technorati report 2008.

Technorati’s ‘State of the Blogosphere 2008’ report is their annual assessment of what’s hot and what’s not in blogging.

This time round they ‘resolved to go beyond the numbers of the Technorati Index’. In order to try and make a more fruitful analysis they talked to the bloggers directly.

For the first time bloggers have been asked about:

  • The role of blogging in their lives
  • The tools, time, and resources used to produce their blogs
  • How blogging has impacted them personally, professionally, and financially

It’s best to look at the report in full for yourself but here’ are a few of the highlights:

‘Blogs are profitable’: The majority of the 1,290 respondents (from 66 countries, across six continents) have advertising. Among those who advertise, the mean annual investment is $1,800 and the mean annual revenue is $6,000. For the lucky ones with 100,000 or more unique visitors per month the mean annual revenue is $75k +. Technorati flags up that the medians are lower than those figures.

‘Blogs are here to stay’: On average the bloggers have been at it an average of three years and are collectively creating close to one million posts every day. Blogs have representation in top-10 web site lists across all key categories, and have become integral to the media ecosystem.

US bloggers: 57 per cent male; 58 per cent aged 35+; 56 per cent in full-time employment; 26 per cent single (surprising, no?)

Blogs are not distinct from the mainstream: “Larger blogs are taking on more characteristics of mainstream sites and mainstream sites are incorporating styles and formats from the Blogosphere. In fact, 95% of the top 100 US newspapers have reporter blogs,” the summary reads.

Technorati’s methodology is described here. The main question that springs to mind is whether the type of people likely to respond to the random requests for participants (and perhaps engage in a bit of blog-boast) might have more success on average than the people who ignore these kind of requests.  But is it possible to find bloggers at random, to represent the mass blogging population?

YouTube partners Pullitzer Center for journalism contest

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As Journalism.co.uk reported last month, YouTube has created a competition for ‘non-professional, aspiring journalists’ as part of its new journalism programme.

The Pullitzer Center has now come on board to support the Project:Report contest, which aims to ‘tell stories that might not otherwise be covered by traditional media’.

The winner will receive a scholarship at the center and a $10,000 grant to produce a video report from anywhere in the world.

The first assignment of the competition (there will be three rounds in total) asks YouTubers to profile someone in their community and produce a video report in English of no more than three minutes.

Submissions will be reviewed by a panel from the Pullitzer Center and 10 successful entrants will move onto the next stage. This phase will be judged by YouTube users, who will select five finalists.

The closing date for the first round is midnight (EST) on October 5.