Mar. 5, 2008 (China Knowledge) - China and Singapore have inked a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to promote collaborations in interactive digital media (IDM) technology research and development yesterday, according to sources.
The two sides will exchange the training and information, which will help the two countries to consolidate their IDM technology capabilities, according to a joint statement.
Institutes of Higher Learning (IHLs), research institutes and companies from both countries will better participate in IDM technology research and development projects under the deal. Besides, both sides will promote the joint market of IDM technology products from the collaborations between the two countries, and they plan to set up a joint working group to facilitate cooperation under the MoU.
An agreement has also been reached between China's Science and Technology Commission of Shanghai Municipality (STCSM) and Singapore's Media Development Authority to develop cross-boarder on-line digital media test-beds to trial and prototype emerging interactive new media services and technology.
Tuesday, March 4, 2008
Sunday, March 2, 2008
43. Zed Media
There’s no need to spin a defensive company line about this media agency that wants to place itself “where all lines meet”. Staff at the London-based firm plan and buy advertising space for businesses such as BT, Scottish Widows and BMW, and feel a genuine bond with the company.
The 110-strong business gets its highest scores for the fun employees have with their teams, its supportive management and the chance staff have to grow. People are excited about where the organisation is going (an 85% positive score) and feel fully involved at work (84%).
From the day they start at Zed Media, staff formulate a personal development plan that is updated every three months. The firm invests in bespoke courses, including management coaching, and funds qualifications. There are lunchtime training sessions, with a free lunch provided, as well as buddy systems. Staff say the job is good for personal growth (85%), with beneficial training (81%) and valuable experiences for the future (88%).
Everyone earns more than £15,000 a year and a quarter of employees have a salary of more than £45,000. Maternity leave is eight weeks at full pay, in addition to the statutory package. All employees are entitled to free private healthcare, including their families (which about half take up). Everyone has life assurance and critical illness cover, and the firm also offers company loans.
The business offers a variety of flexible working methods, including home working and compressed or staggered hours, giving people BlackBerrys, mobile phones and remote IT access. Few have suffered work-related stress in the past year (85%, a top 20 positive score).
There is a designated environmental officer and Zed has been assessed by the Carbon Trust in an effort to reduce its impact on the world. Staff have paid time to volunteer for charity and the organisation matches funds raised for any sponsored activity. This is not driven by a desire for publicity (66%).
People feel a healthy buzz working in their teams (79%) and the job is enhanced by perks such as free fruit, subsidised massages and gym membership, reflexology and even beauty treatments. Zed encourages people to cycle to work and offers early finishes for good work or bank holidays. It even provides discounted hypnotherapy to help stop smoking.
The 110-strong business gets its highest scores for the fun employees have with their teams, its supportive management and the chance staff have to grow. People are excited about where the organisation is going (an 85% positive score) and feel fully involved at work (84%).
From the day they start at Zed Media, staff formulate a personal development plan that is updated every three months. The firm invests in bespoke courses, including management coaching, and funds qualifications. There are lunchtime training sessions, with a free lunch provided, as well as buddy systems. Staff say the job is good for personal growth (85%), with beneficial training (81%) and valuable experiences for the future (88%).
Everyone earns more than £15,000 a year and a quarter of employees have a salary of more than £45,000. Maternity leave is eight weeks at full pay, in addition to the statutory package. All employees are entitled to free private healthcare, including their families (which about half take up). Everyone has life assurance and critical illness cover, and the firm also offers company loans.
The business offers a variety of flexible working methods, including home working and compressed or staggered hours, giving people BlackBerrys, mobile phones and remote IT access. Few have suffered work-related stress in the past year (85%, a top 20 positive score).
There is a designated environmental officer and Zed has been assessed by the Carbon Trust in an effort to reduce its impact on the world. Staff have paid time to volunteer for charity and the organisation matches funds raised for any sponsored activity. This is not driven by a desire for publicity (66%).
People feel a healthy buzz working in their teams (79%) and the job is enhanced by perks such as free fruit, subsidised massages and gym membership, reflexology and even beauty treatments. Zed encourages people to cycle to work and offers early finishes for good work or bank holidays. It even provides discounted hypnotherapy to help stop smoking.
The politics of media development
The term “media development” might remind many people in South Africa of the Media Development and Diversity Agency (MDDA). Well, the term has become a buzzword in international media financing.
My aim here is to draw upon a talk I gave in 2007 at the Sol Plaatje Institute for Media Leadership/Konrad-Adenuer-Stiftung conference for media executives held in Cape Town. By so doing, I seek to indicate the key “media development” initiatives that have unfolded since the report of the Commission for Africa was issued in March 2005. More importantly, I wish to specify the “politics” associated with the concept of media development.
Although the concept of media development is certainly not new, it has attracted much attention in the past couple of years, resulting in the formation of such entities as the African Media Development Initiative (AMDI), the Global Forum for Media Development (GFMD) and so forth. The AMDI has since merged with the Strengthening African Media (Stream) consultative process to create an African Media Initiative (AMI).
The AMI is in its inchoate stages, with the express brief of consolidating the AMDI and Stream media-development recommendations into a bankable technical report that can be used to lobby governments, donors and the private sector to support the growth of media institutions across Africa. At the centre of these initiatives are: the BBC World Service Trust (AMDI); the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (Stream) and Internews (GFMD).
Unesco is also involved in developing indices to measure media development, but I did not focus on it during my Cape Town talk, nor will I do so here.
As I have already suggested, the concept of media development is not new in Africa. The very existence in South Africa of the MDDA clearly demonstrates the fact. But it is evident that the meanings attached to the concept are not fixed. In some instances, the term is used to connote the intellectual and spiritual growth of the media, as when the World Association for Christian Communication calls its journal Media Development; in other cases, it is used to refer to the economic-infrastructural development of the media, as when donors pour huge sums of money into purchasing new computer technology for media houses, especially during election times.
Increasingly, the concept is being interpreted to indicate much more than the above. It is being viewed as the totality of all support mechanisms for the growth of media institutions into vibrant agents of social and political change in democratic and undemocratic polities.
The recent resurgence of interest in media development is generally associated with the report of the Commission for Africa. The commission was set up in 2004 by the then British prime minister Tony Blair. But it would be a mistake to stop there; the media and communications landscape in Africa has been undergoing major changes, signalling the need and presenting opportunities for a concerted initiative to take advantage of such changes in favour of strengthening media institutions.
At least within the specific context of Africa, it would not be far-fetched to argue that the beginnings of an international support mechanism for the media are traceable to Windhoek, Namibia. In 1991, Unesco called for a gathering of media practitioners and press-freedom organisations in Namibia on May 3. This conference culminated in the Windhoek Declaration on Promoting an Independent and Pluralistic African Press. The declaration set the background for the proclamation by the UN General Assembly of May 3 as “World Press Freedom Day”. The declaration repudiated state ownership of media institutions and justified the doctrine of media liberalisation and privatisation.
Beyond the Windhoek declaration, there is clear evidence of more engagement with the discourse of media development in various African documents generated since Windhoek. For example, the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, in article 9, echoes the rights in article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights has elaborated this in its Declaration of Principles on Freedom of Expression in Africa.
The declaration is important because it elaborates in considerable detail what is meant by freedom of expression. This includes a number of other points of particular relevance for the development of broadcasting services in Africa, such as (i) the need to encourage the development of private broadcasting; (ii) the need to transform state or government broadcasters into genuine public broadcasters; and (iii) the need for independent broadcasting regulatory bodies. These points are, in turn, reinforced by the African Charter on Broadcasting, adopted in 2001 on the 10th anniversary of the Windhoek declaration.
But this does not mean that the concept of media development is not unproblematic. The initiatives listed above are faced with the challenge to define it in very specific terms, but what they emphasise might belie their contextual-institutional discursive inclinations. Indeed, the Stream consultative process attempted a definition. As suggested, this has become a discursive matter, reflecting the institutional and membership frameworks of such initiatives.
For example, on the one hand, the AMDI sees media development as aimed at mobilising “a range of African and international stakeholders to significantly boost support for the development of the state, public- and private-sector media”. On the other hand, the GFMD seems to emphasise the aspect of “independent” media. For example, the inaugural conference held in 2005 by the GFMD in Amman threw up points of disagreement about whether “media development” should concern itself with “development of the media” or “development communications”. A significant number of participants felt that the media should not consider it their job to be social advocates and take up the agenda of development and Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).
Even the term “independent” media is not fully unpacked, but, in the GFMD Amman conference report, there are allusions to privately owned commercial media as constituting independent media. For some, this emphasis on commercial media seemed to accentuate the American model of highly corporatised media. For others, this was enough cause to generate a rumour that the American government was interested in “democratising” the Middle East in ways that resembled the highly commercialised American media system. Under this line of reasoning, through hosting the conference in Amman, Jordan, the US government was hoping to send its anti-terror, pro-liberal democracy message throughout the Middle East.
The rumour went so far as to suggest that the CIA funded Internews to help organise the conference. A blogger quoted me as having pointed out this rumour in my talk during the Sol Plaatje Institute for Media Leadership/Konrad-Adenuer-Stiftung conference in Cape Town, without taking into account the full context of my talk.
This attribution is misleading. Firstly, I know of no instance in which the CIA has financed Internews. Secondly, I do not believe that Internews has ever been, or will ever be, funded by the CIA. Thirdly, the involvement of Internews in the GFMD is facilitatory, with decision-making determined by the GFMD international board of directors. The rumour that I hinted at must thus be treated as such — a rumour with no basis in fact whatsoever, but indicative of the general contested ideo-political framework within which the concept of media development is implicated.
While there may be no universally accepted definition of media development, there are universal principles that have emerged over time. Indeed, the international composition of the GFMD is helping in charting new directions towards elaborating such universal principles. The work by Unesco is also beginning to evolve indices for measuring media development. No doubt, these will be subjected to critique.
For its part, the Stream consultative process seems to have adopted a more hybrid approach, echoed by the AMDI study report’s call for a “holistic approach to strengthening the sector” and drawing on the discourses of several international and continental documents, not least the Windhoek Declaration on Promoting an Independent and Pluralistic African Press, the African Charter on Broadcasting and the Declaration of Principles on Freedom of Expression in Africa.
The declaration of principles seems clear about what should be the content of media development, as already explained above.
The African Charter on Broadcasting extends this, and declares that “the legal framework for broadcasting should include a clear statement of the principles underpinning broadcast regulation, including promoting respect for freedom of expression, diversity, and the free flow of information and ideas, as well as a three-tier system for broadcasting: public service, commercial and community”.
For its part, the Windhoek declaration outlines the key components of media development as consisting, among other things, in the identification of economic barriers to the establishment of news media outlets — including restrictive import duties, tariffs and quotas for such things as newsprint, printing equipment, and typesetting and word processing machinery, and taxes on the sale of newspapers — as a prelude to their removal and the training of journalists and managers and the availability of professional training institutions and courses.
It outlines the need for removing legal barriers to the recognition and effective operation of trade unions or association of journalists, editors and publishers as well as developing and maintaining a register of available funding from development and other agencies, the conditions attached to the release of such funds, and the methods of applying for them. It also acknowledges the importance of analysing the state of press freedom, country by country, in Africa.
It would seem, from the above, that media development is clearly much more than the economic and infrastructural growth of media institutions; it also embraces such human-developmental factors as freedom, gender equity, democracy, ethics and so forth. The media types emphasised include public, commercial and community media. Added to this are the newer forms of electronic media, all of which are valued in terms of their actual and/or potential contribution to expanding the boundaries of democratic expression, accountability, participation et cetera.
My aim here is to draw upon a talk I gave in 2007 at the Sol Plaatje Institute for Media Leadership/Konrad-Adenuer-Stiftung conference for media executives held in Cape Town. By so doing, I seek to indicate the key “media development” initiatives that have unfolded since the report of the Commission for Africa was issued in March 2005. More importantly, I wish to specify the “politics” associated with the concept of media development.
Although the concept of media development is certainly not new, it has attracted much attention in the past couple of years, resulting in the formation of such entities as the African Media Development Initiative (AMDI), the Global Forum for Media Development (GFMD) and so forth. The AMDI has since merged with the Strengthening African Media (Stream) consultative process to create an African Media Initiative (AMI).
The AMI is in its inchoate stages, with the express brief of consolidating the AMDI and Stream media-development recommendations into a bankable technical report that can be used to lobby governments, donors and the private sector to support the growth of media institutions across Africa. At the centre of these initiatives are: the BBC World Service Trust (AMDI); the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (Stream) and Internews (GFMD).
Unesco is also involved in developing indices to measure media development, but I did not focus on it during my Cape Town talk, nor will I do so here.
As I have already suggested, the concept of media development is not new in Africa. The very existence in South Africa of the MDDA clearly demonstrates the fact. But it is evident that the meanings attached to the concept are not fixed. In some instances, the term is used to connote the intellectual and spiritual growth of the media, as when the World Association for Christian Communication calls its journal Media Development; in other cases, it is used to refer to the economic-infrastructural development of the media, as when donors pour huge sums of money into purchasing new computer technology for media houses, especially during election times.
Increasingly, the concept is being interpreted to indicate much more than the above. It is being viewed as the totality of all support mechanisms for the growth of media institutions into vibrant agents of social and political change in democratic and undemocratic polities.
The recent resurgence of interest in media development is generally associated with the report of the Commission for Africa. The commission was set up in 2004 by the then British prime minister Tony Blair. But it would be a mistake to stop there; the media and communications landscape in Africa has been undergoing major changes, signalling the need and presenting opportunities for a concerted initiative to take advantage of such changes in favour of strengthening media institutions.
At least within the specific context of Africa, it would not be far-fetched to argue that the beginnings of an international support mechanism for the media are traceable to Windhoek, Namibia. In 1991, Unesco called for a gathering of media practitioners and press-freedom organisations in Namibia on May 3. This conference culminated in the Windhoek Declaration on Promoting an Independent and Pluralistic African Press. The declaration set the background for the proclamation by the UN General Assembly of May 3 as “World Press Freedom Day”. The declaration repudiated state ownership of media institutions and justified the doctrine of media liberalisation and privatisation.
Beyond the Windhoek declaration, there is clear evidence of more engagement with the discourse of media development in various African documents generated since Windhoek. For example, the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, in article 9, echoes the rights in article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights has elaborated this in its Declaration of Principles on Freedom of Expression in Africa.
The declaration is important because it elaborates in considerable detail what is meant by freedom of expression. This includes a number of other points of particular relevance for the development of broadcasting services in Africa, such as (i) the need to encourage the development of private broadcasting; (ii) the need to transform state or government broadcasters into genuine public broadcasters; and (iii) the need for independent broadcasting regulatory bodies. These points are, in turn, reinforced by the African Charter on Broadcasting, adopted in 2001 on the 10th anniversary of the Windhoek declaration.
But this does not mean that the concept of media development is not unproblematic. The initiatives listed above are faced with the challenge to define it in very specific terms, but what they emphasise might belie their contextual-institutional discursive inclinations. Indeed, the Stream consultative process attempted a definition. As suggested, this has become a discursive matter, reflecting the institutional and membership frameworks of such initiatives.
For example, on the one hand, the AMDI sees media development as aimed at mobilising “a range of African and international stakeholders to significantly boost support for the development of the state, public- and private-sector media”. On the other hand, the GFMD seems to emphasise the aspect of “independent” media. For example, the inaugural conference held in 2005 by the GFMD in Amman threw up points of disagreement about whether “media development” should concern itself with “development of the media” or “development communications”. A significant number of participants felt that the media should not consider it their job to be social advocates and take up the agenda of development and Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).
Even the term “independent” media is not fully unpacked, but, in the GFMD Amman conference report, there are allusions to privately owned commercial media as constituting independent media. For some, this emphasis on commercial media seemed to accentuate the American model of highly corporatised media. For others, this was enough cause to generate a rumour that the American government was interested in “democratising” the Middle East in ways that resembled the highly commercialised American media system. Under this line of reasoning, through hosting the conference in Amman, Jordan, the US government was hoping to send its anti-terror, pro-liberal democracy message throughout the Middle East.
The rumour went so far as to suggest that the CIA funded Internews to help organise the conference. A blogger quoted me as having pointed out this rumour in my talk during the Sol Plaatje Institute for Media Leadership/Konrad-Adenuer-Stiftung conference in Cape Town, without taking into account the full context of my talk.
This attribution is misleading. Firstly, I know of no instance in which the CIA has financed Internews. Secondly, I do not believe that Internews has ever been, or will ever be, funded by the CIA. Thirdly, the involvement of Internews in the GFMD is facilitatory, with decision-making determined by the GFMD international board of directors. The rumour that I hinted at must thus be treated as such — a rumour with no basis in fact whatsoever, but indicative of the general contested ideo-political framework within which the concept of media development is implicated.
While there may be no universally accepted definition of media development, there are universal principles that have emerged over time. Indeed, the international composition of the GFMD is helping in charting new directions towards elaborating such universal principles. The work by Unesco is also beginning to evolve indices for measuring media development. No doubt, these will be subjected to critique.
For its part, the Stream consultative process seems to have adopted a more hybrid approach, echoed by the AMDI study report’s call for a “holistic approach to strengthening the sector” and drawing on the discourses of several international and continental documents, not least the Windhoek Declaration on Promoting an Independent and Pluralistic African Press, the African Charter on Broadcasting and the Declaration of Principles on Freedom of Expression in Africa.
The declaration of principles seems clear about what should be the content of media development, as already explained above.
The African Charter on Broadcasting extends this, and declares that “the legal framework for broadcasting should include a clear statement of the principles underpinning broadcast regulation, including promoting respect for freedom of expression, diversity, and the free flow of information and ideas, as well as a three-tier system for broadcasting: public service, commercial and community”.
For its part, the Windhoek declaration outlines the key components of media development as consisting, among other things, in the identification of economic barriers to the establishment of news media outlets — including restrictive import duties, tariffs and quotas for such things as newsprint, printing equipment, and typesetting and word processing machinery, and taxes on the sale of newspapers — as a prelude to their removal and the training of journalists and managers and the availability of professional training institutions and courses.
It outlines the need for removing legal barriers to the recognition and effective operation of trade unions or association of journalists, editors and publishers as well as developing and maintaining a register of available funding from development and other agencies, the conditions attached to the release of such funds, and the methods of applying for them. It also acknowledges the importance of analysing the state of press freedom, country by country, in Africa.
It would seem, from the above, that media development is clearly much more than the economic and infrastructural growth of media institutions; it also embraces such human-developmental factors as freedom, gender equity, democracy, ethics and so forth. The media types emphasised include public, commercial and community media. Added to this are the newer forms of electronic media, all of which are valued in terms of their actual and/or potential contribution to expanding the boundaries of democratic expression, accountability, participation et cetera.
Media agency basks in success
THE Media Development and Diversity Agency (MDDA) has breathed new life into 135 companies since it started its operations four years ago.
Three of these companies have become very successful.
Media entrepreneur Mbali Dhlomo had only her pension money to fund her dream publication, Genuine magazine, in 2001.
By then she had given up on becoming an accountant and had held down a couple of jobs. One of them was as an assistant to the deputy editor of Thandi magazine in the early 90s; another was as an IT practitioner.
Dhlomo says she developed a love for magazines while working at Thandi and vowed to start her own magazine.
She registered her company in 1998, and three years later produced the first issue of Genuine, a family lifestyle magazine for the KwaZulu-Natal market.
When Dhlomo registered the company she thought everything would quickly fall into place.
“It was tough. Advertisers weren’t willing to give me money without seeing a dummy of the magazine and I had to go back to the drawing board.
“I thought the money from my pension payout was quite a lot, but it didn’t last because I also had to buy equipment, so I had to get additional funding. That is why it took three years to get the first issue out,” she says.
The next two years were even more difficult and she continued to struggle for advertising, funding and editorial support.
Dhlomo lost her flat and car and eventually decided to shut down the magazine while she thought of new funding mechanisms.
The MDDA came to her rescue at the end of 2006 with R337 902 in funding.
The money was used for organisational development in the form of mentoring from the MDDA, a feasibility study on the viability of the magazine, buying operating equipment, such as scanners and cameras, and covering the magazine’s printing costs.
The magazine was relaunched at the beginning of last year and now publishes every two to three months. It features profiles of local celebrities, advice columns and motoring – everything you would find in your average magazine.
Some might say it is too early to tell if Genuine magazine is a success, but with a 5 000 print run and 80% more sales than when it was initially launched in 2001 it is well on its way to becoming a big seller for a magazine in its segment.
“People love it because it speaks to them and their needs and there isn’t anything like it in the province,” Dhlomo says.
The MDDA has also helped two community radio stations in the Northern Cape and Limpopo with funding and support.
Radio Riverside in Upington was awarded a R400 000 grant last year which the community station used to purchase an outside broadcast unit to increase its revenue from advertising.
Radio Riverside’s general manager, Thabang Pusoyabone, says since buying the outside broadcast unit the station has doubled its income from R1 million in 2006 to almost R2 million at the end of last year. And all the revenue came from advertising.
“Things are going very well and we think we will double our income again this year,” he says.
The community station broadcasts 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and has grown its listenership to 72 000. This is an increase from 42 000 in January last year.
Pusoyabone says the money generated from operations is used to fund community-related projects.
Last year the station threw a Christmas party for 1 500 underprivileged children in the area. They were also given food and clothing.
The station, which has been running since 2001, also has a school support system where it helps secondary school-leavers with funding for their tertiary education.
Pusoyabone himself is the recipient of a grant. He joined the radio station as a newsreader when it started operating seven years ago. He went on to become a presenter on the station, then received funds to study for a marketing diploma.
After completing this, he rose through the ranks to become the station’s programming manager and, later, marketing manager.
The MDDA awarded him an additional grant to do a course in radio management at Wits University. In 2004 he was promoted to station manager and is now in charge of about 24 volunteers and 19 paid staff members.
“I think we’ve succeeded because we’ve instilled a sense of professionalism in our daily work. We’ve discussed issues that employees are unhappy with and this creates a good working environment for all.
“Our marketing team has also been instrumental in our success. I think other community stations have one person carrying all the marketing responsibilities – one person can’t do everything. We have a team of three very efficient marketing personnel and it is working very well for us,” he says.
Moletsi Community Radio station, which broadcasts to the Capricorn district in Limpopo, has a listenership of 20 000.
Given Mkhari’s Capricorn FM was recently launched in the province and might threaten the success of the station, but station manager Modjadji Mphela says she is not perturbed.
“We don’t fear anything. We welcome the competition because it will help us improve our station and give us reason to strengthen our programming,” she says.
The MDDA awarded the station a grant of R500 000 to build a new office, which Mphela says has become an advertising billboard on its own.
“The new office has really sparked a lot of interest in the community,” she says.
“We used to have problems with marketing, but whenever anybody passes the office, which is situated on the main road, they ask about it. It has really been a great marketing tool for us.”
She says the station needs bigger premises so it can implement its community programmes more efficiently.
“We have an HIV/Aids project where we record tapes that deal with Aids-related issues and distribute the tapes to the community.
“We found that people were not well informed about the virus.
“I once remember riding in a taxi and ended up having a conversation with the driver, who told me there was a serious problem in the industry.
“He said they were burying a driver every week. People automatically associate the deaths with witchcraft, so we did our own investigations and found that a lot of them were dying of Aids.
“So we started recording shows that addressed the issue. The radio broadcasts of the show are then distributed to the taxi drivers,” she says.
The MDDA also helped the station with training and various other forms of support.
“I think our success lies in the passion we have for the work we do. We work as a team,” she says.
The heads of the three media operations say they are grateful for the funding and support they have received from the MDDA.
Without it, they might very well have ceased to exist.
Three of these companies have become very successful.
Media entrepreneur Mbali Dhlomo had only her pension money to fund her dream publication, Genuine magazine, in 2001.
By then she had given up on becoming an accountant and had held down a couple of jobs. One of them was as an assistant to the deputy editor of Thandi magazine in the early 90s; another was as an IT practitioner.
Dhlomo says she developed a love for magazines while working at Thandi and vowed to start her own magazine.
She registered her company in 1998, and three years later produced the first issue of Genuine, a family lifestyle magazine for the KwaZulu-Natal market.
When Dhlomo registered the company she thought everything would quickly fall into place.
“It was tough. Advertisers weren’t willing to give me money without seeing a dummy of the magazine and I had to go back to the drawing board.
“I thought the money from my pension payout was quite a lot, but it didn’t last because I also had to buy equipment, so I had to get additional funding. That is why it took three years to get the first issue out,” she says.
The next two years were even more difficult and she continued to struggle for advertising, funding and editorial support.
Dhlomo lost her flat and car and eventually decided to shut down the magazine while she thought of new funding mechanisms.
The MDDA came to her rescue at the end of 2006 with R337 902 in funding.
The money was used for organisational development in the form of mentoring from the MDDA, a feasibility study on the viability of the magazine, buying operating equipment, such as scanners and cameras, and covering the magazine’s printing costs.
The magazine was relaunched at the beginning of last year and now publishes every two to three months. It features profiles of local celebrities, advice columns and motoring – everything you would find in your average magazine.
Some might say it is too early to tell if Genuine magazine is a success, but with a 5 000 print run and 80% more sales than when it was initially launched in 2001 it is well on its way to becoming a big seller for a magazine in its segment.
“People love it because it speaks to them and their needs and there isn’t anything like it in the province,” Dhlomo says.
The MDDA has also helped two community radio stations in the Northern Cape and Limpopo with funding and support.
Radio Riverside in Upington was awarded a R400 000 grant last year which the community station used to purchase an outside broadcast unit to increase its revenue from advertising.
Radio Riverside’s general manager, Thabang Pusoyabone, says since buying the outside broadcast unit the station has doubled its income from R1 million in 2006 to almost R2 million at the end of last year. And all the revenue came from advertising.
“Things are going very well and we think we will double our income again this year,” he says.
The community station broadcasts 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and has grown its listenership to 72 000. This is an increase from 42 000 in January last year.
Pusoyabone says the money generated from operations is used to fund community-related projects.
Last year the station threw a Christmas party for 1 500 underprivileged children in the area. They were also given food and clothing.
The station, which has been running since 2001, also has a school support system where it helps secondary school-leavers with funding for their tertiary education.
Pusoyabone himself is the recipient of a grant. He joined the radio station as a newsreader when it started operating seven years ago. He went on to become a presenter on the station, then received funds to study for a marketing diploma.
After completing this, he rose through the ranks to become the station’s programming manager and, later, marketing manager.
The MDDA awarded him an additional grant to do a course in radio management at Wits University. In 2004 he was promoted to station manager and is now in charge of about 24 volunteers and 19 paid staff members.
“I think we’ve succeeded because we’ve instilled a sense of professionalism in our daily work. We’ve discussed issues that employees are unhappy with and this creates a good working environment for all.
“Our marketing team has also been instrumental in our success. I think other community stations have one person carrying all the marketing responsibilities – one person can’t do everything. We have a team of three very efficient marketing personnel and it is working very well for us,” he says.
Moletsi Community Radio station, which broadcasts to the Capricorn district in Limpopo, has a listenership of 20 000.
Given Mkhari’s Capricorn FM was recently launched in the province and might threaten the success of the station, but station manager Modjadji Mphela says she is not perturbed.
“We don’t fear anything. We welcome the competition because it will help us improve our station and give us reason to strengthen our programming,” she says.
The MDDA awarded the station a grant of R500 000 to build a new office, which Mphela says has become an advertising billboard on its own.
“The new office has really sparked a lot of interest in the community,” she says.
“We used to have problems with marketing, but whenever anybody passes the office, which is situated on the main road, they ask about it. It has really been a great marketing tool for us.”
She says the station needs bigger premises so it can implement its community programmes more efficiently.
“We have an HIV/Aids project where we record tapes that deal with Aids-related issues and distribute the tapes to the community.
“We found that people were not well informed about the virus.
“I once remember riding in a taxi and ended up having a conversation with the driver, who told me there was a serious problem in the industry.
“He said they were burying a driver every week. People automatically associate the deaths with witchcraft, so we did our own investigations and found that a lot of them were dying of Aids.
“So we started recording shows that addressed the issue. The radio broadcasts of the show are then distributed to the taxi drivers,” she says.
The MDDA also helped the station with training and various other forms of support.
“I think our success lies in the passion we have for the work we do. We work as a team,” she says.
The heads of the three media operations say they are grateful for the funding and support they have received from the MDDA.
Without it, they might very well have ceased to exist.
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