Together with our winners, Grace Obike from Nigeria, Maryagatha Gichana from Kenya, and Kwaku Krobea Asante & Adwoa Adobea-Owusu from Ghana, the KAS Media Africa team spent five days as part of our Dialogue Programme engaging with local and international newsrooms, journalists, and experts on politics & economics about the state of media across the world. Knowledge sharing, information exchange and intellectual debate were the order of the week as we learnt about the various issues affecting local newsrooms today such as disinformation, artificial intelligence (AI), and sustainability issues for journalism.
We began the trip in Berlin with a visit to the KAS headquarters to learn more about the media programmes and their work. Thereafter, we went to the rbb/ARD, Deutsche Welle and the Tagesspiegel, all of which were great platforms for information sharing and comparisons between systems and newsrooms in Germany and Africa. Notable issues such as digitalisation, the waning print industry, and the impact of AI, both positive and negative, were discussed.
We also had the opportunity to visit the Bundestag where we heard more about the Africa working group of CDU/CSU in the parliament. The similarities and differences between our democracies and various electoral systems and outcomes were discussed at length. A tour of the dome of the Reichstag was the icing on the cake. Our winners also had the opportunity to paint a picture of how their countries/regions perceive Germany during a session titled “Through the Eyes of our Neighbours - Germany in Africa”. In a non-newsroom environment, we met with the Afrika-Verein (German-African Business Association) where investment in Africa, and the need to create the right environment for mutually beneficial economic and trade partnerships to thrive was the topic of the day.
Our first meeting of the second leg of our dialogue programme in Leipzig was with the Leipziger Volkszeitung where we spent the morning discussing the publication’s origins, evolution and trajectory with the Editor-in-Chief, Hannah Suppa. It is clear from this conversation, and others, that newsrooms across the world that began as traditional print media, must meet the challenges of an online world headfirst, or face extinction. Innovation and determination are key to this survival.
We then met with the team at the European Centre for Press and Media Freedom. Here we learnt about the efforts of a network that works tirelessly, often with numerous obstacles, to safeguard the rights and lives of journalists who are persecuted by their governments and other harmful actors for simply dousing their work. Institutions such as the Centre play an integral role in the security of journalists and democracies across Europe, using partners across the region to keep journalists out of harm’s way.
We closed our dialogue programme on a high note with a visit to the MDR - the public service broadcaster servicing Thuringia, Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt. A critical conversation that lent context and nuance to the media situation in the region along with the socio-political circumstances, was had.
The week was an eye-opening and life-changing experience for our four winners. Engaging with their peers and other experts, experiencing newsroom realities that mirror and are also different from their own and walking away with a wider network from which to draw as they return to their home countries and respective newsrooms, was truly beneficial and instructive.