"THIRTY-THREE years of professional life in journalism in Tanzania is a good time to look back to the past; to take stock of how life has treated you and consider on your next move, if you have one at all. Today's media challenges are quite different from the ones that the previous generation of few Tanzanian journalists faced in the last half of the 20th century.
This is a new setting with the competitiveness of the 24-hour channels, the compulsion to "breaking news"--and many channels openly take credit for it, so as to woo more viewers--the "hunger" of the corporate houses to use the media for purposes different than the dissemination of news. Gone is the era of using typewriters, which made newsrooms noisy in those good old days. New gadgets have replaced the oldfashioned tools which were being used in news collection, processing and distribution. Since the early 1990s, Tanzania has quickly adopted new technology in this computer age, which facilitates quick access to information, unimagined in the past. There's also the social media, which enables ordinary people to express their views. This is a welcome trend but it also poses a huge challenge on how to prevent, without inflicting a censorship of views, irresponsible damage to reputations. The social media - hitherto unthinkable in the era before globalisation, has also changed the rules of journalism and politicians are increasingly getting away from the interview mode of facing journalists and answering questions which could be uncomfortable and resorting instead to having their "one-way," say, through the twitter or the blogs.
Just as politicians are supposed to be accountable to their voters, who elect them to power, so also are journalists accountable to their readers and viewers for the accuracy of information they provide. That was the traditional view. After all, it is information which helps people formulate their opinions, so critical in a democracy. But the younger journalists today do not want to be lectured about how good the old times were. It is also true that the challenges today have become that much more complex. Undeniably, journalism is today gaining interest from better educated recruits in the country. Bigger private newspapers have recruited fresh university graduates for in-house training or training on the job. It has become common for lawyers, engineers, economists, social scientists, mass communication scholars and agronomists to choose journalism as their profession."
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