Recent reforms should help propel media to the next level

Editor,To whom much is given, much is expected. The year 2013 has been generally good for the country’s media because of such things as the new media law, access to information law and the self-regulation aspect. While these are positive steps it also presents a major challenge to our media with regard to professionalism.Hopefully the access to information law, which obliges public institutions to provide information to journalists within two days upon request, will improve the quality and timeliness of the news. There should be less inaccuracies and more depth now that the bureaucracy that journalists have always cited will be no more.Media should also be more analytical now that they have access to more pieces of information than before. Most of the media houses in the country have a habit of reporting plain news without doing any analysis. I hope this will stop, or at least we see a major improvement.For example when reporting on regional affairs; local media hardly do comparisons among countries, leaving the story somewhat shallow.The reforms that have been witnessed by the Fourth Estate over the last one year should help them move to a new level of professionalism and also serve as their lifeline as the media have now been taken over by citizen journalism, which is at times more accurate than mainstream media. It is good to see that the local media began on high tempo at the onset of the self-regulation through such actions as the dismissal of a vernacular weekly editor over unethical reporting. But as the media seek to regulate themselves through a kind of peer review mechanism, they might also want to look into and tackle the problem of inadequate skills in the industry.The new professional body should probably invest in enhancing the skills of most of the practitioners for them to be able to make the most of the much improved working environment.The recent reforms in the country’s media industry should be the beginning of the journey, not an end in itselfJean-Paul Sano, KigaliReaction to the story, “How reforms impacted on media in 2013” (The New Times, December 27)

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Recent reforms should help propel media to the next level