Clear hurdles that hinder access to news

Editor,Thanks Nathalie. This piece is an excellent rejoinder to Allan Ssenyonga’s in The Sunday Times (January 13, 2013) excoriating those who urge for a reading culture - which, in fairness, I took as made with tongue-in-cheek. The fundamental problem you highlight (readers want and can get free news) is not only a Rwandan problem; it is global. Why else do you think the news standards of all the major Western media organisations covering Africa have become so horrible if not because most of their current crop of regional correspondents (although most use very hungry freelancers who couldn’t care about standards any way as long as they got some newspaper space and their cheque) would never have made the grade as local stringers in the previous era? That is if they have any local correspondent at all. Sometimes there is a hot development they may fly in a correspondent to cover it, but most now depend on news agencies like AP, AFP and Reuters that are similarly mostly focused on their bottom lines rather than the standard of their news. In this era where all is judged by the bottom line, no manager of any Western news organisation will survive long in the business if they put standards before pay. This inevitably favours a tendency of putting up hustlers at all levels of the news cycle from its gathering, writing, editing and distribution. And it is also not about online access or online payment: readers, like consumers of everything else, want a freebie if they can get it and if you don’t offer it to them, someone else will. Those who have restricted access to paid subscription have seen their circulation numbers plummet and thus their advertising income. Another problem with requiring online payment is: how do you promote that reading culture by putting hurdles before would-be readers? This is a conundrum for the media industry and the sooner they can resolve it, the better off will society as a whole be.Mwene KalindaReaction to the article, “You get what you pay for’ by Nathalie Munyampenda The New Times (January 14, 2013)

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Clear hurdles that hinder access to news