DW Akademie and the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung are pleased to invite you to the 2019 FoME Symposium held November 7-8, 2019 in Bonn at Deutsche Welle’s headquarters.
“Rethinking media development – New actors, new technologies and new strategies” is the focus of this year’s symposium and explores the future for media development in the new information ecosystem.
Social media platforms have created a complex information ecosystem that is both a blessing and a curse for free and independent media outlets. On the one hand, digital technologies have created unprecedented opportunities for reporting and distributing journalistic content and for many, digital innovations hold enormous potential to reshape the media landscape. At the same time, however, in an age of misinformation and disinformation, traditional media outlets are increasingly under threat as members of populist movements use digital spaces to attack their credibility. As their traditional business models fail, free and independent media outlets are now struggling to survive.
The digital revolution has also radically altered the way we communicate. This means the media development community also has to discuss, rethink and if necessary redefine its strategy to better serve the ideals of freedom of information and free speech in the digital era. The 2019 FoME Symposium brings together journalists, media managers, media development specialists, activists, academics and representatives from government, civil society and private companies from around the world to exchange their views on this topic.
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Good risk communication is crucial for raising awareness among citizens and business about the risks their countries face. However, many countries have seen their risk communication tools fail in the past, leading to persistently low levels of risk awareness, especially in the absence of recent disasters. This OECD report surveys current trends in risk communication policies and practices across OECD and partner countries. It seeks to understand why risk communication tools have failed and what OECD countries can do to improve the effectiveness of their risk communication policies. Based on an OECD-wide survey, the report evaluates the degree to which countries have used risk communication tools to not only increase risk awareness but to inform stakeholders about potential preparedness and prevention measures they can take to boost their resilience to future risks.
This manual and the associated app are designed to assist public health authorities in the World Health Organization (WHO) European Region communicate in response to possible outbreaks of the Zika virus, and other mosquito-borne diseases (MBDs). The main objective of this guide is to enable European countries to learn from the experience of other regions on how to communicate about Zika and apply these lessons to the European context. The guide takes a closer look at recent experience from the Americas and illustrates how this can inform countries in Europe on risk communication preparedness and response to Zika. Much of the preparedness and response advice on Zika can also be applied to other MBD threats. This guide also aims to support countries in the strengthening of their national risk communication preparedness and response to MBDs in general.
This paper seeks to determine the comparative opportunities and limitations of ‘new’ and ‘old’ data sources for early warning, crisis response, and violence research. The authors compare the information set produced through social media violence reporting with conventional violence reporting around the August and October 2017 Kenyan elections. Specifically, they leverage data from a sample of social media reports of violence through public posts to Twitter. These reports are compared with events coded from media and published sources coded by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) along three dimensions: (1) the geography of violence reporting; (2) the temporality of reporting; and (3) the targeting of reporting.