JOHANNESBURG -- African media bosses gather for their annual summit this week to examine how they can harness and “monetise” the continent’s growing youthful audiences who are heavily reliant on digital media channels as their sources of news, information and entertainment.
“This is a natural sequel to our conference last year when we broadly examined how African media was embracing New Media platforms as a source of additional audience reach and revenue,” says Francis Mdlongwa, Director of Rhodes University’s Sol Plaatje Institute for Media Leadership (SPI) which co-hosts the annual Africa Media Leadership Conference (AMLC).
“This year’s AMLC will therefore look critically at what African media firms are already doing in tapping the youth market, the so-called digital natives; what they could learn from media in other parts of the world and what they themselves could do in experimenting and innovating in this crucial present and future market,” he says.
Frank Windeck, head of the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung’s Sub-Saharan Africa Media Programme, which funds the AMLC, said: “When we started the conference, the traditional media dominated the field of participants. This is rapidly changing. Internet entrepreneurs, bloggers and other creatives from the new media are coming on board more and more.
This reflects the 21st century's media reality which is dramatically shaped by new ways of communication. To prepare the African media for the future, we need to create more networks between the traditional and the modern, which we strive to provoke through the conference”.
The AMLC series was launched by the SPI and the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung (KAS) in 2002. The conferences have become an annual high-level platform for strategy formulation, networking and sharing of ideas and experiences by African media chief executive officers and editors-in-chief of print, broadcast, online and converged media.
This year’s AMLC, running under the theme of “Learning from the Future: Africa’s Media Map in 2029”, will be held in Ghana’s capital Accra from October 4 to 7. Previous conferences have been held in diverse African countries, including Uganda, Mauritius, Mozambique, Kenya and South Africa. The conference is by invitation only.
Mdlongwa said: “This year we plan to become a truly pan-African body when we complete our expansion programme and bring in the Maghreb Arab region’s representatives to the conference for the very first time. We started small, focusing on Southern Africa, but we have been gradually expanding our footprint to include East Africa, the Horn of Africa, Central Africa and West Africa.
“In a world in which social capital and networks are playing an ever more critical role in defining the success of any business, we at the SPI are very grateful to the KAS for its solid financial and logistical support without which this important network would not have been possible.”, he added.
The conferences are an unprecedented networking platform by Africa’s top-most decision-makers in the media and at times these conferences have resulted in new business being forged by some of the participants.