Journalism training institutions and media practitioners must keep up with the latest social media trends in order to remain relevant in an era of information overload.
This was said by Zenzele Ndebele, the director of the Centre for Innovation and Technology (CITE) while making remarks on the second day of the future of journalism education in Southern Africa.
The hybrid conference is being hosted by CITE, MISA Malawi, Namibia Media Trust, and DW Academy under the theme, crafting journalism education for viable media.
“Our journalists need to keep up with the trends. Journalism Institutions need to keep up with trends as well, sometimes when you look at course outlines that are taught in universities and you look at what is happening in the media sector, you find that it’s not really…I think our journalism is getting a bit irrelevant, it’s no longer about teaching people how to write stories,” said Ndebele.
He said there is a need to decolonize Journalism education as several theories are outdated.
“I was thinking that up to now people are being taught the Birmingham school of thought, why are not having NUST school of thought, Tsholotsho school of thought, we need to decolonise journalism education because a lot of theories that we were taught are quite irrelevant,” he said.
Ndebele said journalists need to be capacitated with different tools as they have seized to play their role that of educating people.
“I think we have become propaganda tools more than information providers. At this conference when we talk about the future of journalism we are saying as journalists we have a lot of education that we need to do, there are a lot of tools that we need to learn,” he said.
Ndebele said journalists were also losing relevance as they are now competing with other content creators.
“We are here to educate and entertain, I think as journalists we leave the entertainment part most of the time, so definitely when we are talking about media viability we are saying non-journalists are more viable sometimes than us in the newsroom,” said Ndebele.
“They have better ways of covering stories, they have better ways of monetising, what is it that we can do, I think as journalists sometimes we become dogmatic, it is about going on times lines and getting tweets and writing stories, so we moved from armchair revolutionaries to armchair journalists.”
Ndebele also encouraged journalism training institutions to revolutionize journalism teaching.
