Thanks to @penelopeinparis for highlighting this great opinion piece from Tom Kamara, editor and publisher of Liberia’s New Democrat newspaper. Kamara questions the utility of the media training donors seem so eager to pour money into. He makes some good points:
- “Journalism is a profession requiring training and skills development. It takes years, not days at coffee drinking and eating workshops, to train a journalist at academic and practical levels, and the trainee must have the requisite background to excel.”
- “The Liberian media is in deep and serious crisis, a crisis largely emanating from the terrible education system and its rapidly deteriorating trends. Schools that produce semi-illiterate graduates cannot be the pillars for producing professional and creative journalists.”
- “Medical doctors and engineers are not trained at workshops. Journalists cannot be.”
Read it all here. And keep in mind what Kamara suggests but doesn’t say outright: One group or institution’s weakness is always another’s strength… a lesson no doubt brought home recently when the New Democrat’s website was reportedly hacked and its data erased. “You’re rage feeds our power,” the hackers wrote (presumably sic).
