One of my biggest concerns are the lack of originality in reporting in our media. I always get the impression that there's a template that all students are given on their first day of journalism class on how to write a news item.
How many times have you heard the following?
"Scores of Lusaka resident today witnessed..."
"Republican President ..."
"Works at [insert name of company] today ground to a halt when [specify problem]..."
"Police in [insert city name] have arrested ...."
"The Drug Enforcement Comission (D.E.C)..."
(really, what's the point of mentioning an acronym of an organisation we are all familiar with? FAZ is another victim)
Thats just a handful of the opening lines that make me cringe everytime I hear them.
I'm also very worried about what seems to me like unobjective reporting from the Zambian Watchdog . Watchdog needs to realise they are one of the very few online publications and Zambians in the diaspora rely on them almost daily for accurate news from back home. I really have doubts as to these claims:
Who we are
The Zambian Watchdog is owned by private Zambian journalists.
What we do
We publish breaking news on Zambia and about Zambia on a 24 hour basis. We also publish investigative special reports. At times we aggregate news carried by local media.
Our guiding principle
We write news regardless of who or what the subject is. We fear no one. We favour no one.
Like I said earlier, I have interacted with journalists like Costa Mwansa, David Bweupe, Joe Chilaizya and Alexander Musokotwane. I wonder what their opinions on Watchdog are.
In the same vein, the grammatical and spelling errors in our newspapers and online publications are really a crying shame. I'm really not trying to nit-pick but its embarassing to us as a nation to have such glaring errors in daily national papers.
There's my 2 ng'wee
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