The Minister for Information and Member of Parliament (MP) for the Ofoase Ayirebi constituency, Honourable Kojo Oppong Nkrumah has charged state owned media organizations in the country to employ modern news reporting techniques in order to continue to be relevant in the industry.
He believed, it was high time state owned media organisations responded to the competitive media landscape by employing innovative techniques to regain and command the space within which they operated.
The Minister made this call when he paid a working visit to management and staff of the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation (GBC) and the Graphic Communications Group as part of a routine familiarization tour amid ongoing discussions to restructure state owned media organizations to streamline their activities and make them efficient in the highly competitive media landscape.
Hon. Oppong Nkrumah noted that he was mindful of the financial and logistical constraints of these media organizations and pledged his support through the Ministry to augment their budgetary allocations as a way of getting them to be efficient in their operations.
Inject efficiency in operations
In his address to staff of GBC, the Information Minister encouraged the management and employees of the state broadcaster to put all hands on deck and work in transforming GBC from a bureaucratic media organization to a business oriented institution that leverages on digitization.
He said that GBC needed to redefine its focus as state media broadcaster and reposition itself in the industry to become pacesetters in the broadcasting industry.
“Today, GBC has an unclear identity. People expect you to be a public service broadcaster in line with your enabling legislation and therefore, expect you to do some things. Yet at the same time, we expect you to raise money and do commercial things like what private stations are doing. Some of the conversations you are having today about you being the ones properly so called to run the Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT) platform is an example of how the role of GBC moving into the future has not been clearly defined.
“So there is a question of what do we expect GBC to be in the future because if we expect that you will be the same old organization that was set up from 85 years ago with the same old focus, the same old direction and to compete and operate in contemporary times and to be relevant at the same time, then there are too many objectives that respectively I don’t think you can achieve. We have to be clear on what sort of identity we want for GBC,” the Minister said.
The Minister charged staff to channel their energies to digitizing the operations of GBC by leveraging on online platforms.
He added that the digitization of GBC should be handled in a comprehensive manner, one that transformed all aspects of the corporation in line with the demands of modern times.
Be aggressive online
Mr. Oppong Nkrumah on his visit to the Graphic Communications Group commended the group for leading the way in print news reporting in the country. He said that the group has been able to distinguish itself in the print news publication but there was the need for it to go have a heavy digital presence to enable it diversify its operations.
He admonished management to retool and pivot their operations around digital platforms noting that digital media platforms would control the media space due to emerging technologies.
“The way media organizations are taking to digitization, if you are not quick enough to take advantage of online platforms, who knows, you will fall behind your colleagues in the industry,” he reiterated.
Source: MOI (PR Unit)
