adminPlease do not get me wrong, I’m not trying to be prophetic here, but simply urging you to look on the bright side of things to come.
Whatever you have set your mind on, it will be achievable if we maintain a positive mind. I had an occasion last week to share notes with a good old friend of mine Richard, and we dwelt at length on the subject of media entrepreneurship. I must at the onset declare my interests here, because it is the subject of my research project and I have over the past few months gleaning some material on the topic. I must commend
Richard, though, for the simple way that he broke it down and stressed that media entrepreneurship was in its infancy in Zimbabwe and a better understanding of the concept could be deduced from a regional and global perspective. I couldn’t agree with him more.
As a developing country, Zimbabwe has its fair share of media diversity, particularly in the print media where newspapers and magazines have sprung up to fulfil the huge appetite that readers have developed over the years.
We have seen the number of daily newspapers increasing from two to five at one point and now back to four.
One also has to consider the high literacy rate in the country that has propelled us to be the first in Africa thanks to our mass education policy instituted at independence.
Innovation
But what is media entrepreneurship? The phenomenon of media entrepreneurship is currently attracting increasing interest by scholars (including myself!) and practitioners alike.
Most of the attention, however, has been devoted to entrepreneurship within new media at the expense of the traditional media such as newspapers. To the contrary, my findings have been that sustainable entrepreneurial ventures have emerged from these traditional media industries.
Numerous theoretical and operational definitions of the term entrepreneur pervade the literature and most treat Schumpeter’s view (1936) of the entrepreneur as innovator as the touchstone. Others have, however, taken media entrepreneurship as the creation and ownership of a small enterprise or organisation whose activity adds at least one voice or innovation to the media marketplace. This definition embraces all media products and services and also talks of both new entrants and existing small firms. It also implies Schumpeter’s entrepreneurship innovation connection but does not exclude small media businesses that may not be constantly innovating.
New entrants
In the Zimbabwean context, we have seen the emergence of new entrants in the media landscape, whose innovation has added new voices and choice for the readers. Monopolies have been broken and with it came other players providing alternative voices.
In essence this has created opportunities for growth in the media once the regulatory requirements are met.
The pace has, however, not been corresponding in the electronic media where the dominance of the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation still continues. Last year, the Broadcasting Authority of Zimbabwe moved towards freeing the airwaves when it awarded two radio licences to Zimbabwe Newspapers (Talk Radio) and AB Communications (ZI Radio). BAZ has also invited applications for community radio stations around the country in a gesture that has opened up opportunities for social entrepreneurship.
Television
More needs to be done in terms of television broadcasting as the two ZBC television stations continue to dominate albeit with a lot of competition from pay per view and free-to-air channels. Clearly this is bound to change soon and opportunities are beckoning to media entrepreneurs to position themselves to enter this lucrative sector.
While regulatory barriers appear the largest impediment to broadcasting in Zimbabwe, there is increasing pressure to usher in more players given an enabling political and economic environment.
Democracy
The importance of a vibrant and innovative media sector in a democracy has been evident since former US president Thomas Jefferson was quoted in 1787 saying: “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them.”
Frenchman Alexis de Toqueville (1840) recognised the interdependencies among media, capitalism and democracy saying that democracy creates a mass market for literature at a time when newspapers were the only mass medium. The citizens were seeking to be informed to participate in their democracy. Bringing it closer to home and our time, we can deduce that the role of the media is increasingly more demanding now as the people anxiously follow political, social and economic events through what is published in the media. From an academic point of view there is scope for future empirical work on media entrepreneurship particularly of independent start-up companies in the different media industries. In Zimbabwe, little is known about the challenges being faced by the aspects of media management and economics faced by the new entrants save for the constant claims of harassment and interference in their operations by the regulatory authorities
Questions arise whether or not the environment is conducive for media entrepreneurial development in Zimbabwe and what lessons have been learnt by the existing and established media houses? At the expense of stirring an hornets’ nest, I believe this is a subject on interest that deserves further debate.
As always, let’s make money.
Online Reporter
dyton mupawaenda