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Periodical article | Leiden University catalogue | WorldCat |
Title: | Training African Media Professionals: Some Psycho-Cultural Considerations |
Author: | Bourgault, Louise M. |
Year: | 1994 |
Periodical: | Africana Journal |
Volume: | 16 |
Pages: | 51-65 |
Language: | English |
Geographic term: | Africa |
Subjects: | vocational education oral traditions mass communication Education and Oral Traditions Labor and Employment |
Abstract: | Despite the enormity of the task of training African media personnel and fostering the growth of professionalism in African media institutions in the move to indigenize African broadcasting and the African press, media scholars have devoted little attention to what such training might involve, either from a pedagogical perspective or from a socio or psychocultural one. This study fills some of the gaps in the literature on media professionalism by examining the work-related behaviours and attitudes of low-level media personnel in Africa: camera operators, sound technicians, radio producers, television directors, news reporters, and graphics and set designers. The author, who worked with African mass media personnel in 1973-1975, 1980-1982 and 1987, contends that many of the behaviours and values she observed in African media institutions can be properly understood as psychological correlates of the oral cultural tradition. She shows how the oral mind-set is reflected in such values and behaviours of African mass media personnel as lack of time orientation, aggregative and globalistic thinking, limited audience analysis and self-analysis, and situational thinking. Notes, ref. |