By Isaac Ato MENSAH
Accra- 19 November, 2018.
At the 23rd Ghana Journalists Association (GJA) Awards, individual journalists working with the Graphic Group won 11 out of 36 individual awards, that is, nearly a third.
The Graphic Group also won four institutional awards.
Whilst the Graphic Team is celebrating, the rest of the discerning public is saying: ‘Who buys Graphic anyways and who reads Graphic at all?’
‘Content will still be important….writing will still be relevant,’ Professor Audrey Gadzekpo, dean of the School of Information and Communication Studies, University of Ghana, Legon, observes on the death of the newspaper.
Writing, as in print journalism, is more difficult than broadcast journalism; there’re things you’ll say on air that if you have to write, you’ll edit for syntax and context and all.
Besides we all agree that written English is different from spoken English.
Let us reexamine what Dr Doris Dartey, chairperson of the GJA Awards Committee said of the awards both in 2018 and in 2017, the previous year.
First, 2018…..
‘The submission of entries was marred with unprofessionalism especially with those that submitted broadcast works.
Some of them were not and gave us a tough time identifying who brought them.
If we were very strict, the list of winners would have been very minimal.’
Is this not true in other areas of our lives as well?
Do you know of anyone who mixes capital letters with small letters and forgets to write his or her name and index number?
Need I quote a West African Examinations Council or Ghana Education Service document to buttress this point?
Now back to Dartey in 2017….
‘The guiding principles were integrity, confidentiality and efficiency…’
‘She said although an award must be competitive, many entries received demonstrated poor quality of work and urged prospective entrants to respect the awards scheme,’ reports ghananewsagency.org/ghanaweb.com.
‘She said [that] the Award Committee observed that some entries were not well labelled or identified with the name of reporter and media house,’ the news report added.
Dr Dartey called on the GJA to support media houses to train reporters on the layout of stories, while urging editors and producers to provide good supervision of their staff, reported ghananewsagency.com as culled by ghanaweb.com.
To be fair, there are some mistakes that escape editorial scrutiny, but when they are prevalent and repetitive, it reflects more on the editors and media houses.
Clearly the editors themselves need mentorship.
But does the GJA have the technical and financial capacity to support media houses to train reporters as the GJA Awards Committee is asking?
And do media houses have the technical capacity to raise the standard of reporting?
Here Dr Dartey is talking of just news reporting – not feature stories on say, Gold Coast architecture or gerrymandering which requires some research.
Just attend an event and submit a 500-word news report and there are significant problems with the report!
It seems to me one option open to the Awards Committee is to scout for entries on their own from non-members of the GJA for special supplementary awards without asking for applications.
But if Graphic is our standard bearer, then what kind of leadership should Graphic provide this nation – not just to journalists?
Remember also that the Ghana government is a shareholder of the Graphic Group.
What were the quality of stories submitted from the Graphic group and how ‘lenient’ was the Award Committee on those entries?
Alas, what leadership can Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana News Agency provide?
The first news agency established in Sub-Saharan Africa (5 March 1957) for the dissemination of truthful unbiased news’ is only a pale shadow of itself when it comes to content or writing.
There are several graphic examples of the low standards.
And what happened to good old Ghana Broadcasting Corporation (GBC) where good diction and pronunciation was (and ?is) taught?
Remember that GBC has at least 10 regional FM stations and several TV channels?
So if GBC staff cannot label their entries properly how can we get our electronic archives and library tapes intact?
I marched at the Independence Square on 6 March 1991; my family and friends saw me live on TV; I saw myself at 8pm that day in a repeat broadcast on GBC-TV; I can even mention my contingent.
Is the video available?
In times like these you tend to wonder, ‘Who or what can save Ghana’?
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