Newspapers have long journey to go

Definitely, the speech by Rupert Murdoch to the American society of Newspaper Editors has reminded me a vibrant discussion that emerged in our class just in the previous year when our lecturer for ‘New Media Technologies’ Mr. Charles Irigo posed a question as to whether the new means of communications (internet) should replace the traditional media.

Murdoch’s speech explains eloquently about the role of newspapers in the digital world taking into consideration the technology which has grown significantly. Murdoch says newspaper’s readership is deteriorating greatly and thus necessitating an assessment of the reason behind such a situation.

“We’ve sat by and watched while our newspapers have gradually lost circulation. We all know of great and expensive exceptions to this- but the technology is now moving much faster than in the past. Where four out of five Americans in 1964 read a paper everyday, today, only half do,” reads speech in part.

He says the technology has grown more and thus providing more sophisticated channels through which people can obtain and disseminate information in interactive way. The new means of communication have an advantage of capturing people’s attention given their features of interactivity and hence doing away with the tradition dominance of some few people who decides what people should or shouldn’t get as he says in the speech.

“They don’t want to rely on a god-like figure from above to tell them what’s important. And to carry the religious analogy a bit further, they certainly don’t want news presented as gospel.”

To accommodate the situation Murdoch suggests major improvements in the newspapers’ industry particularly finding out ways to cope with the fast growing technology including using newspapers websites to win hearts and minds of people.

Internet training to editors in its 2nd day

Today as usual the internet training resumed with a brief review of the yesterday's lessons that covered the area of 'How internet has changed societies and communications globally before the trainer switched to new topics prepared for us today.


Today we had an ample opportunity to enjoy the rich materials as well as a well established mode of delivery which is practically oriented backed with an outstanding presentation of Peik Johansson, a journalist by profession and training consultant. Today he exposed us into statistics of internet uses in the world, the most popular sites, internet history and problems associated with the internet without forgetting our daily exercise of creating and posting materials in the blogs.


Due to the effectiveness of the training, I even fail to point out what aspect has interested me than the other one as all carries equal weights. Initially, I thought that I'm much delighted with the statistics of internet users but when it came for most popular sites of the world I was also impressed and so it was for the internet history and the problems associated with internet.

Training on internet uses to journalists

Journalism as among the most important careers in human development requires highly skilled personnel to execute it. It is not static but it changes and really the changes are positive geared towards improving the career as any newly adopted changes become better over the previous stages.


Thus, in order to effectively work, journalists need to seek knowledge through self reading as well as getting trainings that could acquint them with sophisticated techniques to carry out their duties and responsibilities unpartubed. This would enable them to be comptent and work whole heartedly to serve their respective communities.


To realise this important aspect of journalism, MISA- Tanzania Chapter in collaboration with the Finish Foundation for Media Development has organised a splendid training for editors and sub editors of various media houses in Tanzania. The training is aimed at introducing participants on the best ways to use internet in the modern journalism mainly for fact finding, news monitoring and crosschecking of the facts.


From today's experience (the 1st day) of the training, there is no doubt that at the end of this training I will be rich on the world wide major sources of information and sophisticated techniques on how to effectively use internet in executing this noble career.