The highly anticipated Media Innovators’ Community Program, a flagship program of Media Futures East Africa, AKU GSMC Media Innovation Centre (MiC), together with its partner DW Akademie, has finally begun with excited journalists from across northern Uganda attending their first session at the Northern Uganda Media Club (NUMEC) in Gulu city.
The first of its kind in northern Uganda, the one-year training program saw ten journalists, who were selected for the program, undergo the first training which focused mainly on how to start and run a successful media start-up.
The training which started today was facilitated by Joseph Ddungu, a fellow of Mandela Washington, who took the journalists through the requirements for embarking on a media start-up.
Among the things that the trainees were taught were; understanding business principles; how to write a business model canvas; how a write business proposal and a business plan; how to build business partners; building customer relations; generating revenue models; how to sustain your business; fundraising, and many other business tips.
Ddungu said that objective of the first session was to show the trainees that journalists, who intend to be media entrepreneurs in the near future, don’t have to stop at knowing how to write and share news content but also need to learn the business side of things.
“The media is being overtaken by smartphone users and journalists have to compete with them for news consumers,” he says. “Journalists need to be creative in finding ways of bringing back the news to the people and at the same time earn from it.”
Doreen Bazil, one of the trainees from Adjumani district whose media idea looks at improving access to information among marginalized groups, said branding and writing business proposals was her biggest takeaway.
Willy Chowoo, a journalist from Gulu city whose interest is developing mobile journalism, noted that he was able to learn more about the different revenue models that a media start-up can lean on for its operations.
While Emmanuel Kei, who also comes from Adjumani district, noted that learning how to write a winning business proposal was something that he was looking up to. And now that he was taught that, Kei hopes to learn and master these aspects in due course through the rigorous back-and-forth exchange of assignments that were given to him and other trainees by the facilitators in the first session.
In the next media innovators’ engagement, the trainees will have the opportunity to meet and learn from the experiences of some of the journalists who are currently running successful media-ups from across Uganda and Kenya.
