BUJUMBURA February 9th (ABP) – The Ministry of Communication, Information Technologies and Media is organizing from February 8 to 9, 2022 at Media House a training course for media managers and journalists, on the implementation of tools for measuring the impact of media content. On that occasion, the Minister’s assistant, Mr. Thierry Kitamoya, indicated that the collection of information costs the media a lot of resources. They cannot therefore invest more in the collection of information and the production of programs without being able to measure the usefulness of the content that they publish.
According to him, the media must know qualitatively and quantitatively the audiences they want to address. Their survival depends on a good knowledge of these target audiences at the same time as customers. By ignoring the audience that a medium wants to reach, he said, journalistic work becomes complicated because, the format of a newspaper, a magazine, its contents and their presentation, the formula of radio and television programming, the genre and content of the programs, the style of animation, … everything is defined according to the expectations of the public. He also indicated that in the production of an animation or information message, one must be able to identify the sensitive chord that will make the people to whom the message is addressed vibrate. He added that for full ownership of the National Development Plan of Burundi 2018-2027, the media must adopt strategies that allow them to produce information and programs likely to change the attitudes and certain cultural behaviors of Burundians that hinder the country’s economic boom. For him, community listening or reading groups can help in interacting with the media.
Mrs. Esperance Nijembazi, executive at the general management of the CIEP (Communication, Information and Education for Development) and consultant who presented on the implementation of tools to measure the impact of media content, indicated that the communication vertical where the sender (the media) feeds content to the receiver (the public) in order to influence it, must give way to horizontal communication, i.e. a communication where the sender and the receiver exchange in order to bring the target community to be at the center of development as an actor at the same time as a beneficiary. She proposed several innovations that the media could experiment with to achieve this objective, in particular by setting up spaces that give the floor to listeners, spectators or readers, strengthening the monitoring system in the media, interacting with the public via ICTs, create listening or reading groups.