Media stakeholders at Nairobi WIN summit call for more women in news

Nairobi. Speakers at the ongoing Women in News (WIN) Africa Summit have called for gender diversity in the media industry. The three-day summit brought together 140 participants including women journalists and media managers from Tanzania, Zambia, Malawi, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Somalia and Botswana to Nairobi, Kenya.

Speaking at the summit on Tuesday, the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (Wan-Ifra) president Mr Michael Golden said that women should be given the opportunity to make their contribution seen and heard.

“Women want to see that they are represented in media management roles, media products and news,” he said.

Mr Golden also highlighted that the media is looking for more engagement. Thus, it is upon the journalists to increase gender diversity in their news coverage.

Head of Digital Times Media Group based in South Africa Ms Lisa Macleod, highlighted that many a times, media organisations focus on their competitors while deciding which stories to publish and forget about their audience preference.

“We always think of our competitors without giving consideration to our audience. We forget who is reading, what they like, what they are consuming and what they do,” she said.

She explained that digital media has changed the news landscape for the better and media companies should now focus on revenue diversification.

Ms Catherine Gicheru, a veteran Kenyan journalist who is the Head of Code for Kenya, an open-data initiative that promotes data journalism, called for women involvement in all media fronts from management to story content.

“There are many journalists who are experts on various sectors but journalists are still not using them as sources for their stories,” she noted.

She wondered why women should only be covered when they are vulnerable, such as stories that depict them struggling in the ghettos.

While addressing how the media can be trusted in the digital era, Mr Churchill Otieno, Nation Media Group’s Managing Editor in charge of digital platforms, emphasized that the media needs some push back, to learn how to provide room and transparency for their audience to know what happens in the newsroom.

He also said journalists need to make their work visible on social media platforms.

“Young people rely on social media for information, so it is up to us to make ourselves visible on those platforms,” he said.

The WIN media management workshop, leadership and innovation summit was organised by Wan-Ifra under the theme of “Reshaping Media Leadership’’, aiming to solidify what women journalists learnt during their six-month course of media management and come up with ways of addressing the challenges that women journalists face in their daily operations.

The speakers also talked about reviewing key challenges for women in media like sexual harassment and creating tips to reshape media leadership to ensure more women get to the helm.