麻豆约拍

The challenges highlighted in the first two blogs have, for some time, prompted much reappraisal and shifts in strategies by many media support organisations, 麻豆约拍 Media Action included.

Working in fragile states where media markets were weak, we shifted our strategy in order to support and strengthen media institutions by co-producing or supporting the production of content which could deliver clear benefits to people: increasing their capacity to hold power to account, improving political participation, and fostering dialogue in increasingly polarised societies.

We were especially proud of our capacity to work with a huge diversity of media partners – community, commercial, social as well as national public service or state broadcasters – to reach well over 200 million people a year. Embedded within our cooperation, the work included intensive training, supporting organisational development and building sustainability. We have also been proud of our investments in research – in understanding what people want and expect from their media, and in better measurement and learning systems (including within our capacity building work).

We have much evidence to suggest that we have achieved a great deal of impact through the projects we have implemented in recent years and we are proud of our record. But in terms of building really strong, economically viable, lasting media institutions, our record like (we suspect) many others, is more patchy. We want to find fresh approaches to overcome these challenges and make public interest media programmes and public interest media institutions more sustainable.

We are looking at different models for doing this but, to take one example, we have a strong reputation for the research we do, particularly in understanding the information and communication realities, expectations and needs of people in society. We are looking at how our audience research, in particular, can be put to more use by our partners so that they can sell advertising off the back of it. And how we can draw on our own research expertise (much of it residing in our country offices) to build the audience research capacity of independent media partners.

We are looking at how not only to support the sustainability of traditional media partners but also the social media platforms we have supported. Many of these are playing the same role as a public service broadcaster but at far less cost and potentially with much better long-term prospects than (say) transforming state broadcasters (although we are not giving up on that). The long running Al Mirbad radio station in Iraq (which we helped found in 2005) now has almost 1.4 million followers on Facebook and 1.8 million subscribers on YouTube. El Kul our online news and current affairs show for Libyans is among the top five most active Facebook pages in the country.

We are looking at how some of the success we have achieved in our in-depth mentoring programmes in countries like Zambia, Tanzania and Nepal (where journalist trainers provide on site support for several months at a time) can be adapted elsewhere. And we want to work with our partners to examine in more depth why some of the programmes we support cannot be better monetised. The programmes - public debates, dramas, and online news platforms -  that we support our partners to produce, often reach huge audiences, more than one third of the adult population of some of the countries in which we operate. That suggests there is a market for public interest media that commands trust and that there might be ways to fund it commercially.

And yet when we stop supporting such programmes, our partner broadcasters too often replace them with imported programmes or other content that does little to underpin public debate (although there are encouraging instances where they are continued). While this might seem a puzzle (why not produce the same programmes themselves to the same standards and sell lots of advertising off the back of it?) - we know why this is the case. The programmes we support are intensively researched (so they respond to the issues people want to talk about), they are highly inclusive (so the people involved are representative of the whole of the country especially the economically and politically marginalised), they are fiercely independent (which takes a great deal of negotiation with powerful interests) and they address really difficult issues (which in countries like Afghanistan makes organising them a significant security operation).

All that makes them valued, impactful and popular but also more complex to produce than alternatives that can fill prime time slots. It is often a better commercial equation simply to replace them with programmes that are sometimes cheaper and generally less political even if that means some drop in audience numbers. Confronting these challenges is just one of the matters that we need to get better at.

These are the just some examples of the work of one institution. Really making a difference will require a sector wide approach and we need much better systems of coordination and strategic coherence to do that successfully. That is the subject of .

James Deane is the Director of Policy and Research at 麻豆约拍 Media Action