Al Jazeera article.

Recently I had the honour of being asked to write a series of articles about the US Presidential Debates and the African
outlook towards them for Al Jazeera.
The first piece just went up and the other panellists make for interesting reading, (my article is also good ;=))
Have a read here and give feedback.
Enjoy.

New Job – Wildlife Direct

Next week on Monday I will be starting an internship at Wildlife Direct, where I’ll mainly work with bloggers to build their blogs and generally to enhance their blogging experience.  Wildlife Direct is an organization which gives wildlife and environmental conservationists a platform to publish and get their experiences out to a wider world through blogs, it also handles donations to the bloggers.

 

 

I have been at Unilever Tea Kenya where I have enjoyed working and I am looking forward to working at Wildlife Direct because and most importantly, the work they are doing is very important as people only get to hear about what conservationists do when there is a crisis, while Wildlife Direct seeks to make this conversation continuous and proactive.  Secondly the job comes with a challenge for me to figure out ways of making the blogs more user and search friendly, a challenge which I am certain I will try my level best to overcome.

 

 

I was at the Wildlife Direct offices and from the little that I gathered then I’ll enjoy working there. 

There is a tendency to look at environmental and wildlife conservation detachedly and think that that is something for others to do, ‘we are all busy with other things’ that is something we should toss out of our minds.

 

 

Check out the various blogs on wildlifedirect,  you’ll find interesting stuff there, stuff that you did not know, and get involved.

 

More from me as I settle in.

 

Cheers.

    

 

Tech-Phobia in Newsrooms

The technological divide that exists between the classroom/lecture-hall and the newsroom is one of the greatest challenges we face as young journalists.

 

The phenomenon of social and new media seems to be adopted perfunctorily in news rooms, I mean you will find good connectivity, superb hardware but the usage of the social/new media tools is next to nil.

 

In journalism school you get the idea that if you do not get onto the social media train you might as well be waiting for it on the tracks to run you down.  If like me you read Jay Rosen a lot then you be aware of the cuts that traditional news rooms have to undertake.

 

Now the whole disconnect is when you get into the news room, mentions of twitter elicits blank stares, an explanation does worse.  You start to wonder if truly social media is what it is made out to be.  But at the back of you mind you know that it is.

 

You know that the future of newspapers is online but the news room itself does not seem to realize this.  Even with journalists losing jobs daily, the message does not seem to hit home.  Even to the point that displaying tech-phobia is some sort of honor badge among the ‘veterans’.

 

Funny thing is that when you turn in a report fast enough you now get questions of how you did, then unofficially you become the in-house trainer.  It is for this reason that I think things are looking up, that in time we will take our place in this new digital newsroom though it would be better if it happened a bit faster.

 

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This is cross-posted at the Tomorrow’s News, Tomorrow’s Journalists blog