KENYA IN THE FACE OF NEW MEDIA

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THE BEAUTY OF KENYA IN THE FACE OF NEW MEDIA TREMENDOUS CHANGES HAVE OCCURRED IN THE WORLD DUE TO TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGES.ITS NOW BEING CALLED GLOBAL VILLAGE The important point to evaluate is weather Kenya as embrased the new media because of its potential to reach the whole world in marketing our tourism. Taking for instance the instantaneous transmission of news,kenya has taken this advantage in posting planned tourism events in websites and other means of international communication.Enabled cultural homogenization and inter- border interaction has neccessited grogth of foreign interest in local culture like maasai tradion.The new media richness has created a path for numerous posting of images of tourists attraction cenres in kenya across the world KENYA TODAY CARRIES ONE OF SEVENTH WONDERS OF THE WORLD-THE MARA WILDERBEAST CROSSING. Talk of others;Abadares ranges,thomsons falls,Nakuru crater and the bird lake,Mt Kenya game reserve and sun healing Mombasa beaches. IS KENYA TOURISM SAFE OR INSECURE IN THE FACE OF NEW MEDIA? Its true that digital age such as video coverage hes taken what we have abroad and therefore the tourists need not to come all the way to see what their friends and relatives have seen.However its important to note that same digital transfer of information acts as a marketing tool and enabling our tourism marketing department to reach distances and even unimagined western households.Today its not a surprise to get in Obama’s and Michels bedroom a big wall hanging picture of MZEE KOBE,,biggest and oldest tortoise in Bamburi –haller animal park . I BET KENYA ,LETS TAKE OUR TOURISM GLOBAL THROUGH NEW MEDIA.WE WILL NOT ONLY GIVE BUT ALSO GAIN. HAVE YOU SEEN THEM? The forests cats,rhinos,witty monkeys,buffaloes,heaviest elephants,ugliest warthogs,the scaliest crocodiles and proudest peacocks? COLUMN BY Mbwiria Lawrence .M,post graduate student of communication and journalism in Moi University-Kenya(2011)

TIPPING POINTS: WHAT IT MEANS TO US TODAY.

THE TIPPING POINTS: what it means to us today

Journalism as a profession has come a long way. When society was still very traditional or rather showing no signs of being mechanized, journalism and the journalist were there. In ancient Egypt for instance, the stone tablets were used to pass on information. The papyrus rolls were being used as papers which some inscriptions were made on it. Later on even before the invention of the telegraph by Alexander Morse in 1837, rulers realized the need to communicate the information from the center to the periphery and they resorted to using smoke and drums. Others even went out of their way and positioned men at strategic points who could shout. All these instances demonstrate that journalism as a practice as evolved from the use of traditional media to the wide range of technological tools that we have today.

The instances above are not tipping points as such. Tipping point refers to that critical point, it is a moment of the critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point. It represents the transition from one level to the next. Such points can be traced to a speech delivered on 13 April 2005 by media Mogul Rupert Murdoch to American Society of Newspaper Editors(ASNE) in Washington DC and another one is captured as the Citizen journalism; an analysis of the way Tsunami which occurred on 26 December 2004 was covered by the media.

Rupert Murdoch is a renowned media personality not because he writes for the newspapers or because he is a newscater, but he is well known for his entrepreneurial skills which have seen him invest in many continents. He is an Australian by Birth and he owns a chain of media outlets there. In USA where this speech was delivered, he also owns the Fox news television channel among other outlets.

In his speech, he was foreseeing a situation where the new technology was evolving at a very fast pace and this was something which could not be overlooked. ‘Scarcely a day goes by without some claim that new technologies are fast writing newsprint’s obituary’, he began. ‘yet, as an industry, many of us have been remarkably, unaccountably complacent’. H e went on to admit before the editors that he was considering himself a ‘digital immigrant’, someone still ‘searching for answers to an emerging medium that is not my native language’.

Murdoch might have been sent by the devil to play the devil advocates role in this annual meeting. As a media owner he was aware that change was like rest and that change was eminent. There was need for not only the media owners to embrace the new technology, but also for the editors to refresh their skills on the new media which was going to be part and parcel of their daily activities.

The change brought about by the new technology was trickling down to the audience and in fact the audiences were the greatest beneficiaries of the new technology. Murdoch admits that his two daughters were ‘digital natives’, according to him ‘they can never know the world without ubiquitous broadband internet access’; he underscored the fact that change was around the corner. Whereas the traditional media was somehow a one-way media, the new technology was turning tables upside down. It brought changes in terms of information access dissemination and digestion ‘when and how they will get it, where they will get it from and who they will get it from’. Murdoch was seeing the opportunities amidst the threats. Opportunities ‘to improve our journalism and expand our reach’.

Technology-savvy young people according to him were likely to turn to the web as their news medium of choice. The tech-savvy youths don’t want to reply on god-like figure from above to tell them; in essence the idea of gate keeping was slowly losing meaning. The journalist should avoid the cliché’ do I have the news to who really wants the news.

The second tipping point came about at the wake a catastrophic Tsunami. This occurred in Indonesia shortly after Christmas in the year 2004. The tipping point here was the facts that not even the world best known News Corporation and Television channels were on site to capture the events as they happened. This raised a lot of questions concerning the idea of ‘outside in reporting’ whereby the media are lagging behind in such situations and that they just send reporters to the scene after the catastrophy.

During this catastrophy, a new vocabulary was born in journalism-the citizen journalism. Amateurs who had phones and cameras were in a position to capture every detail as the waves swept people and their properties. The citizens who were around the scene were in a position to embrace technology by creating blog-spots. This Blog-spots were used to update and even link relatives and friends who were affected by the catastrophy.

The world best media houses were caught pants down and what they could do best was to practice ‘helicopter Journalism’. Helicopter journalism mainly is where the journalist use the helicopters which were distributing food, clothing and other basic needs to the victims to areas which were inaccessible. The media was therefore reactive and not proactive, and therefore citizens took charge of the situation.

As a country, all these wonderful events mean a lot to our local media. We are in a time where media owners need to chat the way forward on how challenges brought about by technology can be creatively absorbed for competitive advantage. Are our editors and journalist acquainted with the new skills as demanded by the internet? Are our audiences aware of citizen journalism and the role they can play? These are questions which are brought about by the tipping points.

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