adminGeoffrey Nyarota Correspondent
THE unfortunate death of freelance journalist Grail Kupakuwanda in the sad circumstances outlined in The Herald on Monday made very sad reading. He was struck and killed by a motor vehicle on October 24, 2015, at the corner of Sam Nujoma and Selous Avenue, and his body was only identified on
Sunday November 1, a week later.
I did not know the deceased personally. So I can only write about him through the circumstances of his passing away.
For the body of a man who, in the words of ZUJ secretary-general Foster Dongozi, was a dedicated journalist who was the secretary-general of the National Freelance Journalists Association of Zimbabwe and a member of the Southern Africa Mining Reporters’ Association to lie unidentified for so long in the mortuary at Parirenyatwa Hospital is both incomprehensible and, perhaps, unforgivable. Members of the Fourth Estate are supposed to be palpably more recognisable.
This sad event is a veritable indictment on Zimbabwe’s media industry, an industry which over recent years has spawned the emergence of an unprecedentedly large cadre of freelance journalists. This phrase has become, in our context, a convenient professional euphemism for unemployed reporters, struggling against the greatest of odds, to survive by attempting to create employment for themselves.
The emergence in large numbers of young graduates from journalism training institutions, who brandish certificates which entail no guarantee of any employment opportunity in the mainstream media organisations, is, indeed, an indictment against those decision-makers who hold positions of authority and influence in the media industry today.
Says Dongozi: “The collapse of the local media industry and closure of some media organisations has severely affected the passion for many journalists who are frustrated at the end of the day.
“Many freelance journalists have found the going getting tougher by the day as they cannot live from contributing stories to media organisations that are also finding the going tough.”
These are among the very issues that the IMPI Report highlighted. It dwells, among a host of other issues of interest, relevance and pertinence, on three particular issues that have a bearing on the sad circumstances prevailing up to the time of Kupakuwanda’s death.
They include the inadequate and inappropriate training of journalists; the poor advertising performance of newspapers, the proliferation of freelance journalists.
Zimbabwe’s most well-known freelance journalist was Robin Drew who, after years as editor of The Herald, was retired after Independence and returned to the beat, now as a freelance reporter, covering Zimbabwe for foreign-based news organisations. His major advantage was that the foreign newspapers that he served valued his many years as Zimbabwe’s top-most journalist to underwrite his ability to evaluate news and produce quality articles. His editorship of The Herald was, therefore, his greatest credential as a freelance journalist and he prospered as one for many years.
Generally-speaking freelance means self-employed, temporary, irregular or casual. In the context of journalism a freelance reporter is one who earns a living by offering articles for publication to media outlets that do not actually employ him in exchange for remuneration after they have published. This is a tough challenge.
Our current breed of freelancers are, essentially, young college graduates churned out by the Harare Polytechnic, CCOSA and a host of other institutions offering journalism courses or academic media related studies. Officials at the Harare Polytechnic School of Journalism and Media Studies pointed out that over a three-year period leading to the IMPI study only one of their graduates had been offered employment at The Herald.
Media houses complained on the other hand that universities such as the Midlands State University and Bulawayo’s NUST were concentrating on academic media studies with their journalism courses not adequately backed with practical training. As a result editors were hesitant to employ graduates from these universities as journalists.
The IMPI Report states that “Zimbabwean colleges produce about 1 000 media and journalism graduates annually, with the majority coming from uncertified institutions.” These are the youngsters who fail to secure employment in mainstream media and are left with no option but transform themselves into instant freelance journalists, with no practical experience whatsoever. They seek to compete in the market against experienced and established reporters at The Herald, The Daily News and NewsDay, whose editors prefer to use the articles submitted by their own reporters over those contributed by often unknown freelancers covering the same press conferences.
Surviving as a freelance news reporter in Zimbabwe is therefore an uphill task. The freelancer must offer a newspaper stories that are clearly better informed and better written than those submitted by the newspaper’s own regular reporters.
Hence the sense of frustration that Dongozi highlighted.
Efforts by the IMPI chairperson to direct the IMPI inquiry to unravel certain perennially problematic areas were heavily resisted by some panelists representing newspapers for clearly self-serving reasons.
A typical example was resistance to a proposal to study the advertising and circulation performances of Zimbabwe’s newspapers. The result of an analysis of the advertising performance of Zimbabwe’s mainstream newspapers revealed a perturbing factor — that some newspapers were operating on the basis of advertising content far below the 60 to 65 percent normally required to sustain them as viable business propositions.
The study, published in the report as an annex to the chapter on “Media as Business”, revealed that the newspapers concerned were occasionally published with advertising levels as low as :
Newspaper Date Advertising Content %
H-Metro Tuesday, July 15, 2014 0.3
Daily News Saturday, June 28, 2014 8
NewsDay Saturday, June 28, 2014 5
Southern Eye Tuesday, July 15, 2014 5
Zimbabwe Mail Monday, July 14, 2014 15
The figures of advertising content quoted above are the lowest recorded for the respective publications during the period under review. To provide context to these figures the highest figures scored during the same period were 58 percent (The Herald, June 26), 73 percent for The Independent on June 27), 59 percent (The Sunday Mail (June 29) and 62.5 percent (NewsDay, July 17). It must be pointed out that advertising booked in The Zimbabwean was not of the usual display nature booked by OK Bazaars or Pick n’ Pay, for instance. It was of a donor-funded nature such as the announcement of NGO activities.
The mainstay of newspapers in Zimbabwe has traditionally been advertising, not newspaper sales. Some publishers argue that their companies now earn the bulk of their revenue from circulation.
It is an open secret though that sales figures of newspapers have taken a steep nose-dive over recent years. The Herald which printed and sold more than 160 000 copies in its heyday in the 1980s now sells about 40 000 copies per day. The Daily News which peaked at 129 500 in 2000 now averages 10 000. These figures are difficult to obtain but with effort they are available. They, however, do not support the claim that some newspapers now make their money from circulation.
Circulation is an important facet of newspaper publishing. It is for that reason that every daily newspaper in Zimbabwe claims to be the biggest selling. To prevent this gross misrepresentation the IMPI report recommended that media houses should register their publications with the Audit Bureau of Circulation (ABC), an international voluntary organisation consisting of publishers, advertisers and advertising agencies, whose main function is to provide a standard procedure by which member publishers compute their net paid sales. The circulation figures are checked and certified by a firm of chartered accountants approved by the bureau.
This proposal was resisted by some IMPI panellists representing newspaper publishing companies.
Strictly speaking, in terms of viability, a newspaper such as H-Metro has no business remaining on the streets. But then it is heavily subsidised through the revenue earned by its longer established stable-mates, such as The Herald and The Sunday Mail, but at the expense of their own bottom line.
It is not surprising that newspapers such as The Zimbabwe Mail, The Southern Eye and only last week, The Zimbabwean, collapsed in quick succession during the period following the release of the IMPI Report, which obviously reminded some of the publishers that publishing newspapers, much like farming, is in fact a business.
When media organisations perform well as businesses not only is security of employment guaranteed, new jobs are created. Unfortunately, Zimbabwe’s current depressed economic climate does not create favourable conditions for vibrant advertising performance by both print and electronic media organisations.
Dongozi’s assertion on the collapse of the local media industry and closure of some media organisations is one, therefore, that the industry will ignore not only at its own peril, but that of journalists such as Grail Kupakuwanda as well.
IMPI was established in a bid to improve conditions for all in the industry, including the deceased Kupakuwanda. It was an opportunity for the industry to identify and address some of the shortcomings currently bedevilling it. Unfortunately the exercise was not taken with concomitant seriousness by those privileged enough to be involved in its execution, with those panellists who displayed the least commitment during the inquiry now in the forefront of seeking to discredit the IMPI Report.
For instance, on the same day that The Herald reported on Kupakuwanda’s death, The Daily News casually described the IMPI Report as “(Professor Jonathan Moyo’s) widely criticised Information and Media Panel of Inquiry (IMPI)”. But the newspaper did not explain for the benefit of its readers where the report is widely discredited or when and by whom specifically it is widely discredited. Neither does the newspaper’s editor, Stanley Gama, disclose that while he accepted appointment to the panel, he opposed it from within right from the beginning. He became the only panellist who categorically refused to hand his CV in to the chairperson, as requested by the Ministry, saying he could not submit the document to “someone like Nyarota”.
I had not known Gama personally before IMPI, except by proxy, perhaps, in his capacity as a senior employee of a company with which I was engaged in a bruising legal battle in court at the time.
I reported his disruptive tendencies on IMPI to the Ministry on August 10, 2014.
“Gama is very sparing in his attendance to IMPI duty,” I said, “so sparing that he cannot be a legitimate commentator on IMPI business. On the few occasions that he does attend he is extremely offensive and disruptive.”
I believe that these issues must be placed in the public domain so that the relentless onslaught of the internal detractors of the IMPI Report is placed in its proper context by a public that must now be thoroughly confused long after presentation of the report to the Ministry.
In any case, through what legitimate process is the work conducted by 25 panelists over a period of 10 months now characterised as Prof Jonathan Moyo’s personal property? In conclusion, if all media stakeholders, including the Ministry of Information, Media and Broadcasting Services, were to collectively adopt a less ad hominem approach in their evaluation of the IMPI Report, they would be better positioned to address a number of the very progressive, pertinent and legitimate recommendations that it makes in the interests of the journalism profession, the media industry and in the interests of the nation as a whole, even if some of the issues have been ventilated in other fora before.
That way and with renewed commitment to ethical journalism, the prospect of young Zimbabweans being trained as journalists and dying in frustration after failing to secure employment would diminish. Such commitment to the revival of our potentially illustrious media industry would be a fitting tribute to the passing away of Grail Kupakuwanda.
May his innocent soul rest in eternal peace.
Online Reporter