Abuja — On Wednesday, I left Nigeria for South Africa for the CNN MultiChoice African Journalist Awards 2009 which held on Saturday at the prestigious International Conference Centre in Durban. My trip was courtesy of MultiChoice Nigeria and part of the two-day programme was a panel discussion on the "Impact of Digital Media in Africa." I was one of the four panelists selected from across Africa that included Kim Norgaard, CNN South African Bureau Chief, Duncan Mcleod, Associate Editor, Financial Mail of South Africa, and Emmanual Juma, Head of Nation Television (NTV), Kenya, before an audience of over 200 people that included some of the best journalists from around the world.

The impact of digital revolution on the media in Africa is an issue that has caught my interest since my days at the Cardiff University, Wales. Therefore, I had no hesitation whatsoever when Caroline Creasy called from the Corporate Affairs Office of MultiChoice Africa in Johannesburg two weeks before the awards to say I had been selected as one of the four panelists in a programme to be moderated by Jeremy Maggs, anchor of eNews, South Africa. It was an interesting session that harped on the need for the African media, particularly the print media, to reinvent itself in the face of digital revolution or face difficult times.

The most difficult question was asked by Nigeria,s Tolu Ogunlesi, a freelance journalist who won this year,s Arts and Culture Award. With almost everybody who has a camera and mobile phone being able to tell a story real-time and with the influence of citizen journalism becoming more perversive, will the print media die naturally, he asked. My answer was contained in the paper I prepared for the panel discussion, which I reproduce below:

"Advancements in technology, indubitably, have helped in transforming journalism globally and Africa is not left out in this revolution. Unlike before, news is no farther than the click of a mouse.

This revolution in news gathering and dissemination is driven primarily by the exponential growth in the use of mobile phones and the internet. In Africa, like in any other part of the world, digital media and internet have become an indispensable part of the media landscape.

Ever since Tim Berners-Lee, a computer scientist at the Cern Particle Physics Laboratory in (Switzerland, invented the World Wide Web (www) almost two decades ago (1989/90), journalism has undergone radical transformation. At the heart of this change is the unconventional media or what Dan Gillmor of the San Jose Mercury News, calls the We Media. This We Media, in itself, is driven by the new journalism fad called the blog, a digital newswire, facilitated by the proliferation of the internet, low production and distribution costs, and the ease with which what is called the Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is used. All these are different components of this powerful push-pull publishing concept.

The question has been asked severally; Why blogging? The attraction of personal publishing lies in its ability to change the power structures in journalism, giving yesterday,s readers the option of being today,s journalists and tomorrow,s preferred news aggregators. Teenage kids, Rupert Murdoch, Chairman and Chief Executive of the News Corporation, noted in a speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, on April 13, 2005, ,,Want news on demand, continuously updated. They want a point of view about not just what happened, but why it happened... they want to be able to use the information in a larger community.,,

Blogging merges this democratisation of the media with speed of news delivery. ,,The central virtue of blogging, I,ve decided, is that in the proverbial agora, or online marketplace of ideas, bloggers are like Socrates on speed,,, writes Chris Mooney, the 2005 winner of the Scientific America,s Science and Technology Web award. The result is that today blogs number well over 30 million worldwide, promoted by the often-free blogging service providers like Blogger and WordPress. An estimated 75,000 new blogs are created daily, an average of one new blog a second.

The near total dominance of the new media technologies has engendered new journalism practices. Thus we now have networked journalism, citizen journalism, the rise of social networks like Facebook, Twitters, My Space, etc., as means of self-presentation. The increasing reliance of the mainstream media on this new media for breaking news all point to what amounts to a paradigm shift in the global practice of journalism. For instance, moments after the execution of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein on December 30, 2006, the graphic details were in the public domain. Interestingly, the ,New Media, beat the ,Mainstream Media, to what arguably was the biggest story of 2006. An amateur video shot using a camera phone was the major source of news on Saddam,s execution. The amateur video containing low-quality footage of the entire execution drama was also notable for the fact that, unlike the official footage, it included sound: witnesses could be heard taunting Saddam. That was also the case in the September 7, 2005 terrorist attack in London when eyewitness camera phone photos became a major part in the media,s coverage of the bombings.

We have also seen what happened recently in the post-election crisis in Iran and the death of Michael Jackson where the social networks and blogs played an invaluable role as the primary source of information. We also saw what happened during the last presidential election in the U.S. where the major candidates, including Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, declared their presidential ambition not by addressing a press conference in the traditional manner but by releasing the information on their websites.

Unarguably, the We Media comes with enormous capabilities which seem to give it an edge over the mainstream media, particularly the print version. The blogosphere, "Can do lots of things better than we can currently do - including fragmentation and connectivity and community. It is wonderfully enabling, intoxicatingly democratic and exhilaratingly anarchic" says Alan Rusbridger. Traditional printing compared to personal publishing remains an expensive process. As Shel Israel, author of the book Naked Conversations puts it: "In the information age, the newspaper has become a cumbersome and inefficient distribution mechanism. If you want fast delivery of news, paper is a stage coach competing with jet planes."

Is personal publishing about to consign magazines and newspapers to the garbage bin of history? Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson think so.

"The year is 2014, and people have access to a breadth and depth of information unimaginable in an earlier age. Everyone contributes in some way. Everyone takes part to create a living, breathing mediascape. However, the press, as you knew it, has ceased to exist. Twentieth century news organisations are an afterthought, a lonely remnant of a not too distant past" the two (California bloggers proclaim.

I disagree with this viewpoint. While it is true that the blogosphere poses enormous challenges to the mainstream media, however, over the years strong symbiotic relationships have evolved between blogging and journalism, with the former acting as both a check on journalistic inaccuracy and source of opinion on which journalists increasingly rely.

Personal publishing carries with its own baggage, which remain the strength of the mainstream media, particularly the print media. Unlike blogging, traditional print media is still the custodian of the core values of journalism - accuracy, objectivity, reliability and pursuit of truth. Consumers of journalism don,t seem to be in a hurry to sacrifice these values on the alter of speed. "There are snakes in this new media ,Garden of Eden" writes Patrick Baltatzis. "Rumours seem to have a natural habitat in the blog world, as well as ranting and personal opinions. The issues of trust and reliability are difficult."

-To Be Continued Next Week