Hi, I like the strategy on naming and shaming, can those of us who contribute donate 2 hours of our time on Thursday morning to read the various dailies and then pick and post the errors that we find. To make it structured can those who are interested please start a thread with the header being the daily you will be covering "N&M The Star" those who want to participate in looking at the particular daily contact the initiator of the thread who will then assign specific pages to each. That's my approach, it is open to criticism and or improvement. Regards Robert Yawe KAY System Technologies Ltd Phoenix House, 6th Floor P O Box 55806 Nairobi, 00200 Kenya Tel: +254722511225, +254202010696 ________________________________ From: Isaac Mutunga <scmutunga@yahoo.com> To: robertyawe@yahoo.co.uk Cc: KICTAnet ICT Policy Discussions <kictanet@lists.kictanet.or.ke> Sent: Tuesday, 11 October 2011, 10:25 Subject: Re: [kictanet] Declining English grammar in our Newsprint The decline of the quality of print journalism has been on a downward decline for the last couple of years. But the current free fall in terms of grammar and quality of stories is worrying. In my opinion there are several causes but the major one is the management. When the IT sector experienced the dot.com bubble bust in late 90s and early 2000, it did not compromise on the quality but instead it raised the standards and the results are the fruits we are reaping. The same applies to print media, poor quality journalism will kill it.
The social media has eroded the advertising base of the news papers leading to downsizing and reorganization of the print industry. This means there are very few journalist and even fewer copy editors. Interns are given important beats without adequate supervision resulting to invasion of privacy, libel and plagiarism. Not all interns are do this but it is better to be cautious when giving them assignments. The issue of cronysim and tribalism is rampant in media recruitment and promotion. Due to this practice some senior editors who are supposed to be gate keepers are merely gate watchers because they do not have the skills to filter out the chaff before the copy is printed. Other times the pull of the advertsers' shilling is stronger than ethical consideration and PR materials are passed on as business news. The remedy for this may be what KICTAnet is doing-providing a fora to discuss the performance of the print media.But there is need to name and shame specific dailies like Makali's Bulletin does giving fortnightly assessment of media performance. May be the Media council could consider setting up an office of ombudsman to help the media in Kenya to engage with the audience constructively. It can be set within the media complaints committee and may be each media house can nominate a member. Chaacha Mwita's book, ,Citizen Power: A Different Kind of Politics, A Different Kind of Journalism, in my opinion aptly captures the point when the rain started beating on the bare back of the print media
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