By: Godfred Amoaful
A former GJA President and Diplomat, Ambassador Kabral Blay Amihere has urged the Ghana Journalists Association, GJA, and all media bodies to remain committed to their mandates of promoting ethical and responsible journalism in the wake of new media and Artificial Intelligence, AI, where fake news abounds.
He said traditional journalism remains the beacon of hope as it continues to provide untainted stories.
Ambassador Amihere however called on traditional media practitioners to converge the use of new media and set standards as it has been in its practice in the last 75 years.
Ambassador Amihere was speaking at the 75th GJA anniversary public lecture held at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, KNUST, in Kumasi.
“The coming in of Artificial Intelligence has its own advantages and disadvantages but I will urge traditional media practitioners to leverage on it at all fronts. The traditional media has lost its frontier in monopoly. It is now the duty of the traditional media to maintain the high standards of professionalism in journalism”.
Meanwhile, the Director-General of GBC, Professor Amin Alhassan called for broader and extensive deliberation among media players and state authorities on how to set the media up for the necessary revenue mobilization from advertisement as a return for their investment in media content.
He said the standard of media operation for 75 years has been under siege. He emphasized that the new module of media production which has emerged from new media where technology platforms do not invest in content generation but are reaping heavily from advertisement is creeping the revenue mobilization of the traditional media.
“Tech platforms like Meta and other social media platforms don’t invest in production but they take the best advertising revenue”
“When my organization like GBC and other media platforms, invest heavily in content creation, but the advertising market is no more what it has been for the past 75 years. What conversations can we have as a country to reflect on this so that we can say, that institutions of democracy called media houses or media enterprises whose economic fortunes will define the quality of journalism in the future”?
“The future of journalism is at stake, we need to start the conversation so we can protect it from going down”, he added.
