Today I attended a
meeting named: “The Promotion of Health Awareness in Tanzania through Media”
organized by international media namely RFI, Deutsche Welle, VOA, PRB and Broadcasting
Board of Governors. It was a well attended meeting and many interesting inputs,
however I had two important observations that I wanted to share with you all.
First and most
important is “Who is driving the agenda on health?” Oftentimes we hear as we
did today that “health news in media does not sell.” For this reason, all of us
in the media tend to seek a ‘partner’ who will fund such stories because we
claim, covering it from our own budget is “not worth it”. For this reason we
find that often the agenda is driven by the donors and government who fund such
programs for one reason or another. What we end up with is stories and reports
that reflect such agenda thus a regular viewer may face a barrage of news about
HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria or whichever disease or health issue is the ‘trendy’
topic among the donors and other funding bodies. Naturally stories like these
do NOT sell because the primary audience is not the viewer or reader or listener
but the funding party. IMHO
In order to make
health news interesting and sellable, we need to come up with programs,
articles, reports that focus on the viewers, readers and listeners. Health is
important to everyone and I am convinced that however ‘poor’ we may deem a
common mwananchi, they are ready to pay whatever they have, for good health. As
we know and probably have seen, heard or experienced, in the unfortunate case
of disease people are ready to sell assets and spend their wealth to regain
health. Now if we can device an exchange whereby people are able to get information
albeit for a small fee then immediately health related news and information will
become not only sellable but ‘hot-selling commodity’ IMHO
Now of course this
begs the question – how can we do that? I certainly have some ideas but of
course in the spirit of this new shift – nothing is for free ;-)
Great Article and thought provoking for the media industry,but we must not forget that this whole idea of transforming "not sell-able" health news to "hot-selling commodity" requires the society to be ready and be interested innit.
ReplyDeleteIn the society we are living,we understand the importance of health but the importance only comes when we are sick,we must build a culture of seeing health as important as food,politics etc but then this has to start from the grassroots.
I remember back in the days we used to have somo la Sayansi kimu,not sure kama bado lipo,there should be health education subjects from primary level to raise awareness of the importance of health,this can incite society to be interested in reading health related news.
In my humble opinion,the reason why health news has been given less priority in the media is because people have not been exposed to such culture.
Mr Mwamoyo Hamza from the Voice of America (VOA) Kiswahili service who was also in the meeting,pointed out a good example that "most media focused on politics and economic news stories", i believe this is because people are now so much interested in those news than before.
The Question is, how do we get people to be interested in reading health related News?
The Change Must Come From Within Us and at the same time journalists must be willing to prioritize on health news same as they do for politics,economics etc!
Nawasilisha
@deeddat
Thanks Deeddat, I absolutely accept your point but I think that people are more interested in health and proof is "Babu Loliondo" who dominated front pages for weeks if not months and all politicians were lining up to get a sip of his kikombe. All those thousands and thousands of people who trekked to get a sip were all sick and mostly desperate! That response should be enough to tell us all that it is NOT true that people care more about politics and economy- Health is priority in our society! And if we package it right - it will be on top of news!
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