Why Africa needs journalists' spring

-accountants, for instance.This means that the profession does not attract the best graduates and school leavers. How did this wretched state of affairs come about? African state owned papers, from which the majority of senior journalists still active in the African press emerged, believed journalism to be a reflection of state activity and thus it was the function of the journalist to reflect state policy.

This led to a lickspittle approach where journalists became sycophantic cyphers of the state. They served not the people but those in power. Indeed many of the journalists I worked with in East Africa and Europe were trained in the old eastern bloc, or in China , or even North Korea. In an environment such as this, the pursuit of transparency was impossible. As for the concept of accountability, that was considered irrelevant.No wonder journalists in Africa never achieved that glossy hero must -do job status that their equivalents in the west aspire to.

Now, with the burial of the socialist era and with the constraints of rigid and doctrinal centralised economic policy being rapidly eased, and in some cases altogether abandoned, with business booming, with African raw materials being hunted down by China, with cities like Dar es Salaam experiencing extraordinary change, journalists, and particularly business journalists have much to catch up with. A new economic order requires a new journalistic approach. How will this be achieved? First and foremost through training. And second, by imaginative use of available resources.

Training takes time and costs money. It is a long-term investment. The training schemes which have existed for years, primarily courses taught in university, need to be overhauled because they are blind to the new political, cultural and economic revolution that has coursed through the veins of the continent.

They are still rolling out graduates who can write a 20,000 word political treatise but find it difficult to put together a running news story on the finance minister's emergency budget.Much money has been spent training journalists over a generation. Experts from the UK and Europe and the US have delivered thousands of workshops. But this approach has plainly not worked. Why? Because it is piecemeal and sporadic and bogged down in the workshop culture.

What does work, however, is to embed experts and young journalists together for long periods. This, of course, costs money and time.

Africa needs to establish new training schools where young trainees can be taught by Africans, not academics who have never set foot on an editorial floor and would not recognise a follow up from a feature. The training must be practical, targeted and delivered quickly. Turning out trained, competent, ethical journalists is, however, not enough. There needs to be a revolution in attitude, in thinking, in how we gather and disseminate news.

After all, what is the point of recruiting a skilled workforce if its product is ignored by the public?

The truth is not enough people read or enjoy access to newspapers and other media outlets in Africa. They either can 't afford the cover price or they have no access. And too often the content of the paper is just not good enough.

Here's a quick test for you: when did you last read a genuinely absorbing feature in your newspaper? The answer, I would guess, is so long ago that you just can't remember.

Meanwhile, the costs of printing and distributing newspapers are increasing, often to the extent that profit margins are compromised, so making investment and expansion a risky business.

But there is a solution to this. Already some African countries have seen a way forward. They are slashing costs and at the same time reaching a new and potentially advertising attractive class of readers by producing not conventional print newspapers but electronic ones.

Already in Zambia and Ghana these online papers are breaking new ground, attracting new readers and advertising too. The Africa of the early 21st century is a fertile ground for journalism. Its successes, its failures, its role models, its nuances, its huge impact on the rest of society, all of this deserves to be recorded not just for the record, but for the benefit of all those living through it.

To be a journalist, a business reporter, for instance, in Africa should be one of the most exciting jobs in town.

The task of the trainers, of editors, and of proprietors is first to realise this and then to make the environment attractive and innovative enough to recruit the cream of the crop.