It’s easy to be pessimistic about the state of media in the world today. Despite the global spread of technology and connectivity, press freedom has been declining for almost a decade and the producers of high quality news and information are struggling to find new business models to sustain their activities.
What can the media development community do about these negative trends? What lessons have we learned about what works and what doesn’t? How do we mobilize governments, donors and practitioners to confront the challenges faced by media in developing and emerging economies?
As CIMA launches a new and improved website, we are refocusing our mission on these practical questions. The new website has not only a new look and feel, but it is organized to make CIMA’s contribution more relevant to the challenges that the global media development community faces today.
We are organizing our content and strategic focus around four issues that have practical implications for media developers everywhere: effectiveness, sustainability, innovation and funding. Our content—both past and future—will be organized under these categories and easier to find and use.
New Features of the Website
Our website is designed to be clearer and easier to navigate. Among its key feature are the following:
- On our homepage, we will highlight our latest research, events and media development news.
- Our four issues areas—effectiveness, sustainability, innovation, and funding—are key guideposts to the content throughout the website and organizing themes for most of our content. If you’re interested in funding, for example, the funding page will display the latest blog posts, funding reports and events that we have held on this topic.
- Country profiles, which display indices of Freedom House, RSF, and the Media Sustainability Index (IREX), making these measures more accessible and a more prominent element of our website and drawing the focus to the performance of hundreds of countries around the world.
When we launched our blog, “The Source,” about a year ago, we noted that our aim was to raise the profile of media development and make our content more visible and accessible. Now we’re fulfilling that promise.
To hear more on these topics, listen to my podcast where I talk more about the thinking behind these changes and some of the ways we are trying to help media development practitioners confront our many challenges.
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