Is the Internet a threat or
Opportunity to Journalism? This is the biggest question that many journalism
scholars keep on pondering about. But the answer to this question depends to a
large extent on how you view it. For some and many may be, an internet age
presents an existential threat to Journalism. It is a threat to both
mainstream media and schools of journalism. They argue that with the internet
revolution, many people are no longer relying on mainstream media as their
major source of news. They instead depend on the new media for most of their
news because new media is fast and that gate-keeping which denies them access
to some information does not apply to new media.
For me, the advent of internet
and new media in general is not necessarily a threat to traditional journalism.
This is what I have come to learn in my four-day internet training for
journalism lecturers here at SAUT. What I see myself is that the internet has
just brought about the “democratisation of communication.” Democratisation in
the sense that with the advent of internet technology, communication is no
longer a monopoly of a trained or professional journalist as it used to be. The
internet has just expanded a communicative space and everyone is virtually
engaged in the communication process.
Otherwise, as our training
reaches the end, I have come to realise that the advent of internet is more of
an opportunity. There is a lot that traditional journalism can benefit
from the internet revolution and new media in general. The internet has offered
an alternative platform for publishing. If the editor rejects your story
because it does not meet his “subjective” standards or criteria, you can still
publish it online. This is what we call online journalism. The internet is also
a ready-made tool for research. One can use it for fact finding and
verification. One can also use the internet to improve his grammar and language
in general. This is the major lesson that I am taking back to my students.
Our last day of training was
overwhelmed with a research assignment. Each of the participant used the
morning hours up to lunch to gather some facts from the internet for his
feature article writing assignment. Myself, I had chosen to write a feature
article on press freedom in Tanzania. With my internet searches, I was able to
find a vast amount of information such as registrations that affect press
freedom in Tanzania. I was able to discover that there is a total of 27 media
laws that the media fraternity in Tanzania consider to be draconian. I was also
able to get examples of media that have been banned as a result of these
oppressive media laws. Further still, I was able to access details on the
security challenges that journalists face in Tanzania. In my feature article, I
was even able to link my reader to the original texts that I referred to.
As we were about to conclude our
training, we were introduced to plagiarism and copyright law. In this, the
facilitator emphasized that plagiarism is tantamount to academic theft that
should be avoided by hook or by crook.
Something unusual happened as we
were about to conclude our training. Abruptly as the facilitator was winding up
his point on plagiarism and copyright law, all and sudden, we felt the building
in which we were shaking. At the beginning, we could not understand what was
happening. We could only hear something like a movement of the wind passing-by . All of us
alarmed, we started peeping through the window to learn what was happening. Oh my God! We then saw our
famous Fr. Mwanjonde Lecture Theater trembling. That is when we realized that
it was an earthquake. Everyone had to make a choice. Some us started jumping
and running downward from the fifth floor of Mgulunde Learning Resource Center
like Muslims competing to throw stones to Satan in Mecca. God is really great.
Otherwise, the whole department was to be wiped.
The training was officially
concluded at 3.30pm with some closing remarks from Dr. Anne Gongwe, the Dean of
Faculty of Social Sciences and Communication. Thanks to Mr. Peik Johanson, our
facilitator from VIKES, the Finnish Media Foundation for your commitment and
job well done.
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