Welcome Remarks by Francis Mdlongwa, Director of Rhodes University’s Sol Plaatje Institute for Media Leadership, at the opening of the Africa Media Leadership Conference in Ghana, Accra, on 5 October 2009

Madam Chair Moagisi Letlhaku

Your Excellency, The Vice President of Ghana

The KAS Representative for Ghana, Mr Klaus

The Director of  KAS’s Media Programme for Sub-Sahara Africa, Mr Windeck

All distinguished guests

I would like to formally and warmly welcome all of you to this, the eighth edition of the Africa Media Leadership Conference, being hosted by my Institute and its partner, the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung.

 You are all extremely busy people  and therefore I really do appreciate the fact that you have taken time off from your hectic work schedules to be with us  in this historic country this week. Your presence here, and in particular of you, your Excellency, The Honourable Vice President of Ghana,  is clear testimony of the importance which you attach to this conference which we are honoured to host in Africa’s first independent country.

 We gather here today at a particularly critical time of change for the traditional media -- not just in Africa but in every country around the world.

 Our long-established newspapers, radio and television stations are all facing a new struggle for survival in the face of emerging digital media platforms that are proliferating virtually every day.  These new channels, especially social networks such as Facebook,  Myspace and YouTube  and most recently Twitter, as well as mobile phones,  are taking away large numbers of our customers and are doing so very rapidly and challenging the very business model that has sustained our industry for several centuries.

 People we used to call listeners, viewers and readers are today increasingly agitating for and are able to be the providers of their own specific news content which they are consuming  at their chosen time and place and using their own preferred media platforms. Today’s media  audiences are not just producing, selecting and customising their news and information content,  but they are also essentially re-defining the role, identity and purpose of journalism and media companies.

In the face of this challenge and the withering  economic recession which has blighted the world in the past two years, we are all now too familiar with the death of several prominent newspapers around the world;  we are all now too familiar with the migration of other newspapers to be online-only specific content providers and yet advertisers who have sustained these media companies for years have either shunned them or gone directly to audiences;  and we are all too familiar with the shrilling calls around the world, including in the US and in Europe, by some journalists who are now  even calling for state assistance to try to arrest the precipitate decline of the traditional media  industry.

And yet these new channels of communication and information are not just new competitors  for the established media but are new and exciting business opportunities for your media companies. Your media companies need to take advantage of emerging economies of scale, of scope, of  geography and of income that are emerging as a direct result of the new media platforms. Indeed, the digital era we are now in calls for a new way of thinking and of doing business among you all.

Unfortunately, there are no maps which will guide us to the future except brief anecdotes of what others, mostly in the Western world, have been and are doing to try to innovate and experiment with these new media channels and thus stem the financial collapse of the traditional media.

We in the media in Africa – as indeed all others elsewhere – must rapidly seek out new and sustainable business models  or become irrelevant in the new age.

For Africa, however, the somewhat  delayed introduction of digital media platforms has luckily given this continent a grace period during which we should all learn from the mistakes and limited successes  of the trailblazers in the West and to map out what will work and not work for us in our own conditions.

This is the challenge for this conference, which this year deliberately seeks to peer into a short 20 years’ time from now to see whether we can find our way into the unknown.

I thank you.

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