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World media summit in Cape Town
1 July 2018
TECH GIANTS TAKE CENTRE STAGE AT GLOBAL MEDIA SUMMIT IN CAPE TOWN
Scholars of media business and media management from across the globe descended on Cape Town in May for the 13th World Media Economics and Management Conference, the first in Africa.
The four-day summit themed “Media Management in the Age of Tech Giants: Collaboration or Co-opetition?” and organised by Rhodes University drew media professionals and media business leaders from across Africa, North America, Latin America, the Arctic, Europe, Asia and the Middle East.
The conference sought to interrogate the business, management and leadership strategies, tactics and policies of the current media industry in Africa and globally to gauge their relevance and effectiveness in an age where international digital media conglomerates are increasingly displacing traditional media in the creation, value-addition and dissemination of media content to audiences.
Hyper-competition from the “platform economy” of technological giants such as Google, Facebook, Apple and Twitter featured high on the agenda and was robustly debated, said conference convener and head of Rhodes University’s Sol Plaatje Institute (SPI) for Media Leadership, Francis Mdlongwa.
A key issue, said Mdlongwa, was how the mainstream media, which was losing not only its readers but also advertising, would survive the age of tech giants.
“The unfolding digital terrain enjoins mainstream media and their journalists to urgently reframe their role and place in a rapidly changing and discontinuous media ecosystem,” Mdlongwa said. “They have to learn to live and thrive in this ‘new reality’ of permanent change and provide better, faster, more credible and more diverse news content which has more diverse voices to audiences who are today co-producing news content as competitors.”
Speaking on the final day of the conference, Mdlongwa said the media itself must begin to look at its own issues more seriously.
“I think one of the most critical points emerging has been the need (for media) not only to report news, but begin to offer solutions journalism as well as the explainer journalism,” said Mdlongwa. “There’s a need for a two-way conversation with audiences and developing, in particular, personalised relationships, which speak to the content needs of individual consumers; building those relationships especially if you’ve got high quality, credible content. That’s what will cement the relationships of media and journalism to their audiences. That’s what will define their future.
“It’s no longer a question of having to just disseminate mass content to an unknown mass out there. We now need personalised content, attuned to an individual’s own personal needs.”
Plenary sessions over the four days included panel discussions on: “The Hype and Myths of Native Advertising and Paywalls: An Assessment of Their Real Financial Impact on Media”; “The Economic Struggles and Successes of Media in the ‘Brave Twenty-First Century’: Case Studies from the Coalface of Selected Regions”; “Harnessing African Media’s Financial Viability: Key Challenges and Opportunities”; and “The Impact of Fake News in Our Regions and Our Responses”.
Keynote speakers included: Prof Sylvia M Chan-Olmstead, director of Media Consumer Research at the University of Florida (USA); Dr Winston Mano, director of the Africa Media Centre and Course Leader at the University of Westminster (UK); and Dr Dumisani Moyo, head of department and associate professor at the Department of Journalism, Film and Television at the University of Johannesburg (South Africa).
The conference secretariat, based out of London and New York, decided to host this year’s summit in Cape Town because the city “stood out so prominently among other world cities”, said Mdlongwa.
“Our visitors will never forget this city. They have had memorable experiences here. Experiences that they will take back to their homes and back to their countries. Some of them are writers for the popular media, they will take this story of Cape Town being a unique place, one place that you should visit before you die – they will take that to their homes and to their countries, honestly.
“So I think Cape Town, being a really unique city, has been the place where the summit had to be held.”
