By Emilia Mbishi
Windhoek, 16 Nov. – The Namibia Media Trust yesterday started a three-day conference on the future of journalism education in southern Africa Geothe- Institut in Windhoek under the theme “digital disruption” hosted by Namibia, Zimbabwe and Malawi.
Ministry of information and communication technology director for media affairs, Frans Nghitila, delivered a welcoming address on behalf of the Ministry.
He noted that the conference comes at a time when the established economic model for journalism was collapsing, news organizations were retrenching and the journalistic workforce was shrinking, the justification for journalism schools to continue graduating thousands of hopeful recruits is increasingly debated.
Gwen Lister a veteran journalist who was also the host of the Ispeak podcast also said that journalism degrees should be dedicated and not be combined with communication as it is done in Namibia.
Guy Berger also mentioned that South Africa had suffered because the advertising was on social media and the news media is losing money.
The first round of the programme was a deep dive into the current status quo of media viability.
At the roundtable discussion led by Frederico Links it was brought up that journalists in Namibia are not as trusted as politicians and that accuracy and factual reporting was failing.
Yesterday’s afternoon session, The J-Sprint: Viability and Resilience for Journalism Training Providers, was a fantastic informative session that covered the “what,” “how,” and “why” of viable journalism training. Henok Fente, the executive director of the MERSA Media Institute in Ethiopia, and Erik Albrecht, a media trainer and consultant with the DW Akademie in Germany, joined the conversation virtually via Zoom.
Fente shared that MERSA has a clear vision of where they want to go and how they’d grow from the ‘J-Sprint’ and said the institution’s vision is to train future multimedia digital story tellers in Ethiopia.
