When will we have “pure quality players” in Senegal?
Exclusive online newspapers abound. But in term of substance as well a form, few are professional.
Today (November 18, 2013), a new Senegalese information website is born. One more among the several “pure players” coming to compete with traditional media, which however, more and more, have their own website (This is going to be the subject of a future post…).
Among the competition virtues, you can find the will to upgrade the quality. However, the suspicious minds could get it wrong…
Regarding the form: Homepages stretch for miles and take minutes to display, pages architectures are messy and difficult to read, items are not dated, no details of the website, no legal mentions, and sometimes, not even an email address, no link to Facebook or twitter pages, headlines without content, starving articles with a French sometimes incomprehensible and full of mistakes…
Regarding the substance: priority to people, sensational and standards cases, marabou forums alongside photos or videos of half-naked women (under the false pretense of reporting promiscuity, one rinse his eyes and quenches the voyeurism of the internet users in a kind of general schizophrenia), propagation of information and rumors without verification (which is, as you know, basics of journalism), mistaken identities, false information which may lead to self-righteousness… N’en jetez plus.
ISO 9001 standard of journalism!
Journalism doesn’t have its place on half of those websites, which are, most of the time, contents aggregators: they took over the press information (with or without permission). But more and more, it has to be said that pure players make use of writers. Probably coming from chicken batteries, without any journalistic training and/or no ethics. How many are they, those pure players, try to distinguish themselves by seeking truth and quality? Let’s not go further and start counting.
To quote an old comic, we can say that: « Thinking that if we just stopped reading them, they will stop publishing…”, but “Information” has its reasons which reason itself ignore, as well as an exhibitionist needs an audience and vice versa. Other option: Readers can criticize their favorite informational website (!). Which is a method already use by some people. Training is actually one of the solutions.
But how many journalists are school graduates, and among them, how many are well trained? Even the famous CESTI (Centre d’Etudes et de Sciences Techniques de l’Information, Université Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar) must deplore lower quality. However, what can young journalists do while facing a publication director whose only concern is “to sell”. Would a code of ethics on which sites would commit signatories, be a solution? And why not a quality certification, an ISO 9001 standard for journalism?! This is our level right now.