Gerencia de desarrollo de productos y servicios

Apart from funding that can invariably impact on staff, technological, and production developments, another significant issue that exerts pressure on the organization of community media in South Africa, Nigeria, and Ghana for success in activism is audience development and participation in all facets of community media management and productions. Modalities for effective audience participation as well as for audience demographic analysis are very big policy issues among community media groups and governments of the three Sub-Saharan countries. The general conviction of respondents and governments is that participatory programming could create not only income and audiences, but also loyalty for small media institutions with implications for ongoing efforts at collective campaigns for reforms (NFVF’s Draft Report on Third Film Indaba, 2010, p. 9).

The comments of majority of respondents from across the three countries further indicate three emerging patterns of audience participation in community media: (i) the

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participatory engagement of different categories of audiences in the organization and management of community media stations through different formats of representational structures (e.g. OMM, IMM, the Board of Trusteeship, or Executive Board/Council); (ii) the giving of access to technologies and technicalities of productions to enable individuals, communities, and civic groups voice out their concerns and represent themselves; and (iii) the strategic and partial delivery of audiences from the informal economic sector to advertisers, through the selling of advertising spaces (in print media) or time slots (on electronic media).

Thorn of CTCTV, for example, notes that the community television station builds capacity for audience participation through engagements with different stakeholders in the community at the management and production levels.

On the management level, the station draws on its OMM strategy to engage different categories of civil societies, activist organizations, and NGOs in the management of the station at AGMs and on the Board. She admits, firstly, that the adoption of OMM is valuable because it enables viewers and communities to become ‘active’ partners in the life of CTCTV. Secondly, the long-term goal of OMM “[…] is to basically boast the capacity of NGOs to produce contents for CTCTV”.

On the production level, she admits that principally the mission vision of CTCTV is to provide people access to the powerful medium of television to promote human rights, social justice issues, and participatory democracy. This entails drawing on audience- relation policies (training, technical advice, and broadcasting opportunities) that aim to strengthen the communication capacity of civil society organizations and individual producers in order to empower them to have strong voices at advocacy; as well as “enhance the work that they are doing - whether it is dealing with gender issues;

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prevention of HIV/AIDS and other socio-economic issues or labour movement and sport-related issues”. She explains that it is in this regard that CTCTV adopts something similar to the Public Access Model of programming to encourage broad-based participation of viewers in programme productions.

The station’s adoption of this model is given greater visibility through one of their programmes called “Open Studio” whereby “anyone in the community that wants to host their own show has the right to do so”. For her, the use of this decentered and participatory model implies a deliberate rejection of the top-bottom production model peculiar to SABC and other commercial stations in their professionalized approach to content production and engagement with audiences.

She further admits that while the “decentered model of programming” holds serious challenges to the station in terms of the required resources (human expertise and capital) to sustain it, it also holds positive implications in terms of a careful definition of co- production agreements to benefit all production partners in the areas of technical commitments, revenue distribution, and specification of the right of ownership of completed programmes. Thorn notes that the split varies in each case depending “on the inputs of the various co-production partners”.

Technically, CTCTV functions only as “the technical and broadcast partner” (providing studio recording and studio live broadcasting); while the independent producers are expected to function only as “editorial partners” (in terms of scripting and provision of settings, crews, inserts, and sequences) or they are expected to bring to the station their ready-made contents, either in DVD formats or through cell phone recordings.

In terms of the distribution of revenue and of the right of ownership of completed programmes, she explains that the split is always “a 50-50% down the middle”, whether

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the producer is from within or outside South Africa. But if independent producers raise their own capital and equipment and the only thing CTCTV is expected to do is to provide “a broadcasting deal” then the producers retain 100% of the revenue benefit and of the copyright. The only thing CTCTV gets is the exclusive right to broadcast the programme for a period of six months. After that the right reverts to the producers who can sell their programmes anywhere in the world and keep all the income.

Thorn admits that the outstanding thing about the model, firstly, is that it encourages private producers, not only to develop and actualize their talents both at production and fund-raising, but also to benefit from their creativity. Secondly, it enables the station show-case local talents and community-generated contents, which national regulatory requirement currently stands at 55% as against the required 45% foreign contents.

From the point of view of advertising, Thorn explains that because CTCTV was set up in a way that was not really sustainable and had to function under serious financial pressure which made the full realization of its goals and mission sometimes difficult, it builds up audiences from the informal economic sector in Cape Town, using the commercial segments of programming, to be able to deliver those audiences to advertisers. But because CTCTV is always conscious of compromising its editorial independence if it has to fall back heavily on advertisement income, the station maintains a carefully-controlled ‘business model’ to inform audience relationship.

Evidently, the engagement of CTCTV with its audience through ‘moderated’ commercial activities has been undertaken against HSRC’s research wisdom that it could force CTVs to compromise on their community development potentials (Hadland et al., 2006:170). How a breach on this research advice has actually impacted on the community development potentials of CTCTV is not yet clear.

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The three-point approach to audience capacity development evident in South Africa was equally present in the testimonies of respondents from Nigeria. Muhammed of Media Trust Limited (Abuja), for example, shows that their company draws on three different participatory strategies to actively engage with and to develop the production and consumption capacities of audiences.

The first strategy is the constitution of an Executive Board which membership cuts across professional, religious, and ethnic divides. He maintains that the Board members of Media Trust are not only people who are media professionals or people who are from the Northern region. Experts in law and economics and other trade areas are involved. People from the Yoruba and Igbo-speaking areas of Nigeria are also actively involved in the life and management of the company. Thus, the strategy for the organization of the institution recognizes the need to bridge the ethnic and professional divides in the country.

The second strategy is in two forms. The first form is through the provision of spaces for individuals, civil societies and NGOs to publish their events and write stories on health, justice, and human right issues. Students from different educational institutions also send in their written materials for publication. As Muhammed explains, students that make outstanding reports on campus-related issues are generally given a stipend of N3, 000 as incentive. This is in addition to a promise of automatic employment with the company after the completion of their studies.

The second form is the encouragement of a participatory story-telling in the forms of “Letter to the Editor” and “Opinion/Comment” columns. These participatory strategies allow the newspaper company to receive timely feedbacks and personal comments from private citizens and institutions and to publish them to engage with readership. And,

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because their readers are actively involved in generating contents, Muhammed notes that ordinary citizens love reading their community papers.

The third method of audience participation, Mohammed admits, is a ‘modest’ delivery of audiences to advertisers. Muhammed indicates that the establishment, as a policy, does not engage on extensive advertising in their community-oriented publications (e.g. Aminiya; Eko Chronicle, Aso Chronicle and Kano Chronicle) to avoid their editorials being compromised. Their advertising loading is reasonably controlled to provide spaces for reports on social and political developments; as well as on the concerns and activities of local communities.

Unlike South Africa or Nigeria, a good number of respondents in Ghana, however, failed to highlight the three-way audience participation strategy. Only respondents from Radio Ada (Big Ada) and from Universe Radio (East-Legon) indicated the existence of a similar structure (representative Executive Board, participatory programming and moderate participation in advertising) in Ghana.

Explaining the nature of their media-community interactions, Lahweh of Radio Ada notes that, among other things, the development process of the radio station is always carried out in partnership with the community. This could come in different ways: through a joint effort to constitute the Executive Board of the radio station from among those known to and appointed by the community; through collective research and regular consultations to revise the mission objectives of the radio stations which happens every 10 years; and through a working partnership with staffs of government development departments that have extensive services in the community and that use the radio station as a resource center for creating awareness and implementing

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government programme policies. Together with local volunteers, the external staff members remain vital programmers and story-tellers for the radio station.

Secondly, the station draws the topics for their radio discussions from the community. Generally, it is the representatives from the community and their opinion leaders that dictate and shape what they have to do, even before they come on air. Apart from this participatory approach to programming, most of their broadcasting (talk and music- shows) are done by community members who have already been trained in the rudiments of radio operations. And because the radio station depends on volunteers to do what it has to do, Lahweh admits “children, youth, and women participate in our radio operations”. For him, while it is a lot cheaper to maintain the radio station in terms of technology, it is far expensive to maintain it in terms of community participation in programming. Yet, the radio station has a commitment to live by the participatory programming expectation of the African Charter on broadcasting.