School of Journalism, Media and Communication

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https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11951/249

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Browsing School of Journalism, Media and Communication by Subject "Community media"

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    Community Audio Towers in Uganda
    (3CMedia, 2016-05) Semujju, Brian
    While community broadcasting has been documented for aiding development in the Global South, communities in Uganda engage in narrowcasting and share information using Community Audio Towers (CATs). This challenges our understanding of communication for development media since CATs employ both the one-way and the two-way approaches to ensure survival. Among the crucial areas of CATs that have not been attended to by academic scrutiny is the issue of how CATs sustain themselves financially. To cover that gap, the CAT processes of information gathering, processing and dissemination, are discussed below. The discussion comes from data collected using 10 key informant interviews to show how CATs, platforms that are economically non-viable, are able to survive in myriad economically-oriented media systems in Uganda. Implications of CATs for local community development are herein highlighted.
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    Introducing Community Audio Towers as an alternative to community radio in Uganda
    (Journal of Alternative and Community Media, 2016) Semujju, Brian
    Community radio started as an alternative to commercial media. The need for an alternative was clear, with many societal voices unrepresented, indicating the domination of the means of mental production by a few. This article presents two communities in Uganda that use Community Audio Towers (CATs) as an alternative to community radio, and examines why the communities prefer the use of CATs to ‘mainstream’ community radio. Using data collected through observation at two sites in Uganda and 10 key informant interviews from major communication stakeholders, including Uganda’s Minister of Information and Communication Technology, the article presents findings indicating that CATs are self-sustaining, with no NGO influence, and they redefine news to mean local emergencies and occurrences, while having no structures (horizontal/vertical rhetoric) as they are started and run by one community member. The challenges of the new alternative media are also discussed.
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    Participatory media for a non-participating community: Western media for Southern communities
    (Sage publications, 2014) Semujju, Brian
    This paper draws on the contrast between community media and the nature of its communities in Africa that are not participatory but use participatory media. The general contention is that participatory media in Africa preside over non-participatory communities. The paper uses data collected at one Ugandan community media to prove that the limitations between community media and ‘the community’ require over half a century to solve. The immediate solution should be to rethink the idea of community, pay more attention not just to the nature of which media can develop which community as if it (community) was a homogeneous entity but also the idea of which community has the ability to host which media. The paper concludes by suggesting a redefinition of media to include non-media forms that show more potential in enhancing participation for all than community media.