Media Viability is arguably the biggest challenge facing the media industry today. It is a complex and dynamic concept with different interpretations by different people depending on their experience and background. Some people see it as an economic or finance sustainability issue and to this school of thought, media viability is all about money.
There is also another school of thought that broadly looks at media viability beyond the money. This school of thought asserts that media viability is more than just money without discrediting how important finance is in the process. In fact money is a cross cutting component covered in the bigger economic element that also analyses the sources of income and influence to the editorial independence among other things. This comprehensive model of media viability championed by DW Akademie looks at five dimensions that influence the functioning and quality of journalism. These dimensions include politics, economics, content, technology and community.
According to DW Akademie these indicators help develop a common language for media viability and kickstart sustainable and productive conversations. Feeding off the DW Akademie MVI framework, this article serves to contribute a new conversation framework that offers thoughtful, creative and provocative questions that can be used by media managers, editors, and journalists to reflect on the challenges they face in their media houses and find solutions.
5Ws and H
The 5Ws and H can be traced historically to Greek Rhetorician Hermagoras who came up with the framework of dividing a topic into its seven circumstances of “who what, when where, why, in what way, by what means and how.” Later the framework would be used in religious confessions, basic information gathering, research and police investigations. We have also seen the same 5W&H framework applied to add intentional reflection to problem solving in project management. In line with journalism and media, the 5Ws&H framework is applied to information gathering and news writing to an extent a news story can only be considered complete if it answers the “who, what, where, when, why and how”. The intention of applying this old age framework to reflecting on media viability is to use a system that is familiar to the journalists and media managers to generate sustainable conversations and personal reflections.
Its Application to Media Viability
The 5Ws & H of Media Viability tool uses the media viability indicators developed by DW Akademie to provide a reflective framework with questions framed to trigger creative and thoughtful responses from media managers and journalists. The facilitator’s role is to provoke the participants to critically think about the questions and develop as many responses as possible in relation to their context. The beauty about this framework is that it can be used by an individual to internally process and reflect about media viability in their context. This can be an individual journalist reflecting about the impact of their stories to media viability of their company, a media manager reflecting on sustainability and impact status of their company or even a young media entrepreneur critically thinking about how to break even in the industry. It can also be used by a media manager to facilitate a conversation with their team to find answers to the media viability questions challenging them or even to a bigger scale of media viability market analysis and an analyst finding answers to the challenges facing the industry. Hopefully, at the end of the creative thinking process, the user of the guide must develop an action plan focusing on identifying the core business model, signature quality content, community engagement strategy, technology utilization, marketing and promotion.
Framework
This reflection looks at the 5Ws and H of the different dimensions of media viability including content, community engagement, economics, politics, and technology. Every dimension has 5Wand H questions that you can process and reflect. It is important that you brainstorm these questions in relation to the context of your media company. A critical inquiry on how and why a certain question applies to your company is important in the reflection process.
5ws and Economics
5Ws and Content
5Ws and Monetising content
5Ws H and Politics
5Ws H and Technology
5Ws and Community
5ws and Community Engagement
These questions are not an end to the reflection on finding solutions to the challenges of media viability. They are not a silver bullet. Consider this a useful reflection guide that can help you to discover some practical solutions to the media viability challenges you face as a media house. The reflection must also be followed by a practical work plan that will help you practically achieve the answers you find during the reflection. With this framework, addressing the challenges of MV require reflecting on what is working and what is not working. You will need to be intentionally vulnerable, thoughtful and practical to use this framework.
Report by Aga Khan University’s Media Innovation Centre analyses the country’s millennials and digital natives’ media consumption habits.
The partnership will also ensure that local content is curated and distributed to better optimize the product and meet the needs of Kenyan online users.
This report investigates the link between media safety and media viability.
The two reports examine policy towards misinformation in Sub-Saharan Africa.
The Reuters Institute Digital News Report highlights trends in the types of devices used for news consumption, as well as access and trust data for individual outlets in Kenya.
The GFMD MediaDev Fundraising Guide is designed to help anyone seeking funding for media development or journalism support projects.
Put in context, it is safe to argue that the plural media in Kenya could be in the business of reaching the audience and not necessarily serving this audience with public interest, local news.
This animated explainer offers media managers, journalists, consultants and scholars a brief look into the Media Viability concept.
Meet the founders of Ludique Works. The media start-up was part of the first cohort of the Innovators-in-Residence-Program.
Towards Understanding News and Information Inequalities. By Hesbon Hansen Owilla, Njoki Chege, Alex Awiti and Caleb Orwa.
The African Media Barometer delivers a home-grown analysis of the media landscape in Tanzania.