Learning Contunity

Learning and continuous professional development is not a choice for a journalist. It is an absolute priority because the very nature of journalism is a life of constant research, learning and accurately unpacking information on new and unfamiliar subjects in realtime.

The mainstream news media today faces an existential threat. First, it must win in a competition against machines. While media organisations spend a fortune to source original news and images. But once they publish the news, technology companies immediately latch on both text and images, reproduce them online and grow rich on advertising revenue while paying no compensation to the owners of intellectual property.

In addition, today anyone with a smartphone can publish news content, personal opinion commentaries, share personal experiences and personal accounts of news events directly with their followers without going through the news media.

While technology has brought significant new advantages to freedom of expression, democracy and human rights, citizen journalists share information that bypass the normal journalistic rigorous checks for factual accuracy, context, balance and concern not to harm others.

Concerningly, elements with ulterior motives are able to exploit the new information environment to destabilise social harmony and spread misinformation, disinformation and hate speech.

Journalists have already lost the challenge of first to break the news. News makers now break their own stories and leave it to journalists to unpack how important it is and mine it for meaning.

What journalists can continue to do which no artificial intelligence or influencer can do, is to continue to produce original news content, provide analysis and projections based on interviews with genuine people and issues.

With support of the European Union, the Swaziland Editors Forum in collaboration with the University of Eswatini have created a new learning platform that seeks to respond to emerging needs of the news industry. The programme provides training of working journalists in the broad range of skills and subjects required for the media industry to be competitive.

The annual masterclass, hosted at the Kwaluseni Campus brings onboard learning resources of the university with the practical experience of working editors to up-skill working journalists on the range of needs from effective writing and story-telling to financial literacy, research and investigative journalism as well as public opinion assessments.