Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Tanzanians like to chat and gossip

Here are some of the topics covered in today’s training.

We started the morning by visiting the American online magazine Salon, which is featuring quite lively reporting and commentary on news, politics, culture and human interest. I wouldn’t regularly follow that site while in Finland, but the story of how it came about is worth sharing. It grew out of a strike. When the print newspaper San Francisco Examiner was shut for a while in 1994, a few of its journalists taught themselves the HTML website designing code language and practiced making an online newspaper with the new technology. They found the experience so nice that at the end of the strike some of them gave up their jobs at the print newspaper and launched their own online paper, probably the biggest of its kind at that time and still active.

We also searched the Wikileaks website to find all the 663 diplomatic cable reports sent from the American Embassy in Dar es Salaam between January 2005 to February 2010 about often secret discussions held between Tanzanian officials or individuals and US diplomatic staff. The revelations that the anti-corruption chief of the Tanzanian government was afraid for his life can be found here.

Statistics on internet usage in different world regions and countries attracted a wild debate. In absolute numbers, there are nowadays most internet users in China, USA, Japan, India and Brazil, in this order. Only then follow some European countries, Germany, Russia, UK and France, and right after them comes Nigeria, the new leading African country in the chart, boasting 44 million internet users, at least according to the figures published by the website Internet World Stats.

In recent years, the biggest growth in the number of internet users has been registered in Sub-Saharan African countries, especially Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda and lately also Rwanda. In all these countries, the number of internet users more than doubled during just a period of one year. In Tanzania, however, such growth is not yet to be seen. Neighbouring Kenya has almost six times more internet users (four million) than Tanzania (676,000), although the population in Kenya is smaller than in Tanzania. One obvious reason is the language. In Kenya, the middle class speaks English, while in Tanzania the common language is Kiswahili. And from the web you can find so much interesting and useful information in English, while the Kiswahili content is still limited.

We noticed another thing in the latest statistic, namely that almost two thirds of Tanzanian internet users are also using the Facebook, while in most other countries in the region a much smaller proportion of the internet users would have a Facebook account. Some participants said that this is obvious, because Tanzanians love to chat and gossip and watch pictures, and are not so much interested in serious issues. There is not a reading culture, many people rather shun away from books. The education system has been in shambles since the good old days of the 1970’s, said the more senior participants. It would be the task for the new generation to change this pattern – if it’s at all about to be changed.

So far, the local online media doesn’t appear very high in the statistics of the most visited websites in Tanzania. According to a statistic from last year, BBC and CNN were among the Top 20, and the most popular local media website was, maybe a bit surprisingly, Global Publishers, the media house selling sensational tabloid papers such as Uwazi, Amani and Ijumaa. They were in position 28, followed by the popular blog of photojournalist Issa Michuzi. Far behind came the online editions of the English-language newspapers The Citizen (70th) and Daily News (80th). The online editions of the Kiswahili newspapers were not yet among the Top 100 most visited websites in Tanzania.

For comparison, the discussion site Jamii Forums was the tenth most popular website on the list.

Jokes and laughter and high expectations

The training participants have made their first postings to their blogs. Links to all the blogs are on the right.

I truly recommend that you read the beautiful narration by Rose Haji, the most senior participant of the training, about how she felt to join the group of professionals of the younger generation who she thought would find it only natural to surf for their information and update their profiles in the digital networks.

But she wasn’t out of place. “It is a small group of 11 people with brains. We interact, participate and mostly share jokes and laughter!”

”Age ain’t nothing but a number. I am moving to dot com right from day one”, she concludes.

Here again you can find the posting of Bestina Magutu, news and current affairs editor at Tanzania Broadcasting Corporation TBC. She tells about some of the practical exercises we did during the opening day, booking flight tickets and finding other services online, as people in Europe have been doing already for some years, and now the same kind of services are gradually moving online here in Tanzania too.

Bestina says she enjoyed very much visiting the website Project Gutenberg, where one can read and download entire book classics as electronic files. One who agrees with that is Masembe Tambwe, weekend editor of the newspaper Daily News, who goes on to say that “much as the internet is a tool I use every day, there is still a lot that I don’t know. I plan to get as much as I can this week and will most definitely share this knowledge with mates and colleagues.”

Eleuter Mbilinyi, subeditor of The African, also shares his expectations for the coming days. “From today’s experience of the training, there is no doubt that at the end of this training I will be rich on the worldwide major sources of information and sophisticated techniques on how to effectively use the internet in executing this noble career.”

Monday, January 30, 2012

Clearing the jungle in the tovuti class

This is my first posting from a five days training course for Tanzanian editors and journalism lecturers in the use of internet, tovuti in Kiswahili, for fact-finding, news monitoring, communication and publication.

It is already the fifteenth internet training event for Tanzanian journalists, part of a training programme launched in 2008 and organized jointly by MISA-Tanzania and VIKES Foundation, a solidarity organization of journalist associations in Finland, with support from the Finnish Ministry for Foreign Affairs.

In the streets of Dar es Salaam it’s sweating hot today, but we have spent the entire working day in the cool air-conditioned multimedia room of the Tanzania Global Development Learning Centre, located at the Institute of Finance Management, the leading business school in the country.

During the first day, we have had eleven participants in class. They are mostly subeditors, news editors and feature writers from the national mainstream newspapers, radio stations and the government broadcasting corporation TBC, but there are also three lecturers from local journalism schools and the editor of the Kiswahili service of the IPS news agency.

We started the day with an introduction round and each participant listing their expectations for the training week. Most of them wished that they would learn more appropriate ways and better techniques to find information – “in order to clear a path in the internet jungle”, as Hikloch Ogola, journalism lecturer from Tumaini University, expressed it.

Many of the participants underlined that they want to share the new knowledge with their colleagues in their newsrooms.

Rose Haji, veteran journalist among many of the younger participants, admitted that she belongs to the P.O. Box generation, but after this training she hopes she will be well equipped to move on to the new era of dot.com.

After the introduction and a tea break, we did some exercises on how to book a train ticket in Finland and how to buy a flight ticket in Tanzania. (A new online booking service has just recently been launched by the local airline Precision Air.) We also visited a number of websites that have in one way or another changed the world in the quite recent era of internet.

We have seen what Americans buy from eBay and watched a YouTube video of Barack Obama in January 2009 saying that he promises to close down the Guantánamo detention camp within one year. We edited a Wikipedia article about the major local newspaper in Tanzania, shared ideas about the importance of online games, visited the Twitter site of the Somali militant Islamist movement al-Shabaab, and downloaded some electronic books from the website Project Gutenberg, which claims to have over 38,000 free ebooks in its collection.

At the end of the day, the participants opened their own blogs. I will provide links tomorrow.