NEPALI TIMES editor-in-chief Kunda Dixit challenged the benefits and pitfalls of new media influence on in-depth journalism in the inaugural Media, Investigative Journalism and Technology Conference at AUT University in December.
New media could be an outlet for stories that due to commercial pressures within newsrooms would not otherwise get published, he said.
However, he admitted that new media did have flaws.
“The problem with the internet is that you usually preach to the converted,” he said.
And the decreasing amount of space available for investigative journalism in mainstream media meant that longer, in-depth stories were sidelined.
“The internet gives you that space, but even there you are battling very short attention spans,” he said.
Focus on people
As a way forward, he suggested multimedia news reports to capture audiences, but warned these pieces needed to be the product of in-depth journalism that addressed the people most affected by it.
More than 100 people attended the successful MIJT conference hosted by the Pacific Media Centre and opened by PMC chairperson John Utanga.
TVNZ’s Pacific affairs correspondent Barbara Dreaver was a keynote speaker and other Pacific participants included Kalafi Moala (Tonga Media Network), Patrick Matbob (Papua New Guinea’s Divine Word University), Shailendra Singh (University of the South Pacific in Fiji) and Koroi Hawkins (Solomon Islands Television One).
Dixit, well known in the Pacific when based in Manila for the Inter Press Service, worked as a “parachute” journalist for the BBC before civil war broke out in Nepal in 1996.
Other stories on:
* Blessing of the new PMC office
* Asia-Pacific scholarships
* Milestones
* Picture gallery on MIJT
Toktok
