The battle between old and new media
With Sule Musa
Having as a practice, Europe and America serving as global reference point for nearly every progressive narrative, this article seeking to throw light on journalism and the crisis of evolution on its trail will not defer.
However, suggestions that the birth of journalism took form in Europe around the 1500s will, quite likely, fall behind Africa where journalism, in some form, began much earlier.
This, perhaps, will necessitate a definition of journalism.
Media scholars agree to simplifying the definition of journalism as the mechanism of gathering, processing and disseminating news and information through many and various media like newspapers, radio, television, online and the emerging vehicles of social media.
Accounts on the origin of journalism, in Europe, that is, have it that the men and women who came to be known as journalists, began by writing news and information on pieces of paper with pen and their own bare hands; and pasting the paper on chosen items at strategic places for public view and reading.
In most of Africa, however, journalism began in quite a different way. It started in Africa with known community individuals with access to the rulership who dispense important information to the public using various systems including beating instruments that secure immediate attention to listen to the news and information to be broadcasted. It was heavier on the orals than the written.
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