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From turning pages to downloading them
Wilson Johwa, Inter Press Service (IPS)
January 23, 2007

http://www.ipsnews.net/africa/nota.asp?idnews=36273

JOHANNESBURG- Piles of fast-selling newspapers on many a street corner, with early morning queues of commuters killing time reading and discussing the day's top stories... This scene from the 1980s and 1990s in Zimbabwe is now a distant memory, recognisable only to older urbanites.

Workers who formed the queues have since become a rare breed, thanks to a six-year economic crisis that has wreaked havoc on the country's productive capacity, and pushed unemployment to 80 percent, according to government figures.

Politics, on the other hand, has led to a muffling of independent voices, with four privately-owned newspapers being shut down since 2003. Only two independent publications survive -- The Zimbabwe Independent and The Standard -- alongside various government-controlled papers like The Herald, The Sunday Mail and The Chronicle.

One privately-owned media house is no longer regarded as independent, having reportedly been infiltrated, and subsequently taken over by the state intelligence agency.

However, press freedom is making a stand elsewhere. Zimbabwe's harsh business environment, coupled with restrictive media legislation, has led to the creation of a stream of news websites focusing on events in the Southern African country.

Some online material also finds its way onto the three foreign-based radio stations that deal with Zimbabwean affairs. Voice of America broadcasts a news bulletin from Washington DC via AM while SW Radio Africa and Voice of the People both relay their own separate bulletins from Britain and South Africa, respectively. However, accused of representing interests inimical to the "Zimbabwean national interest", all three stations operate as renegade news outlets.

Despite being at a considerable distance from sources and audiences alike, the radio stations have come to be key providers of independent news and analysis for people in Zimbabwe. However, the channels have recently reported having their signals jammed, allegedly by the government.

To date, at least 10 Zimbabwe-focused news websites have been established. Some carry original material; others, such as zimbabwesituation.com and zwnews.com, repackage news about Zimbabwe that has already featured in other publications around the world.

Zimbabwesituation.com was launched in April 2000, just after the land invasions of white-owned farms started, "initially to keep friends and family abroad aware of what was happening in Zimbabwe," says Australia-based co-founder Barbara Goss. The site has an average of "80,000 page views per week, while hundreds subscribe to its e-mail newsletter", according to Goss.

Many of the sites were founded by exiled journalists, and are typically maintained from abroad. They include newzimbabwe.com, set up in 2003 in Britain. It carries provocative commentary from some of Zimbabwe's best-known personalities -- and offers readers the opportunity for debate and feedback on its articles.

In 2005, newzimbabwe.com claimed to be the most popular website in Zimbabwe, rating higher than even the 100-year-old government-controlled daily, The Herald. This followed a ranking of global sites in terms of traffic volume by Alexa Web Search, a U.S.-based search platform which reportedly placed newzimbabwe.com at position 38,154, higher than The Herald at 41,874.

"With draconian media laws continuing to throttle the life of publishing and broadcasting in Zimbabwe, these (online) agencies have become an increasingly important source of alternative information for many Zimbabweans who can access them," says the donor-funded Media Monitoring Project Zimbabwe (MMPZ), which recently began including online news platforms in its weekly reports of press freedom and media bias in the country.

What may be driving the growth of the online publications is that, according to the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe, about a quarter of the country's 12 million people now live outside the country, in places where they are assumed to have some access to the Internet.

But, while many Zimbabweans can log onto the web, there are more who can't. The International Telecommunication Union, a Geneva-based international organisation through which governments and the private sector coordinate global telecom networks and services, says only 6.7 percent of Zimbabweans in the country were connected in 2005.

Furthermore, internet cafés have become "outrageously priced beyond the reach of many", while in the capital of Harare access is also hampered by regular power cuts, explains a report by the African Media Barometer.

This is a system for analysing national media environments that was started in 2005 by the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, a German-based cultural non-profit institution committed to the ideas and basic values of social democracy and the labour movement, and the Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA) a non-governmental organisation with members in 11 of the 14 Southern Africa Development Community (SADC) countries.

But concerns about Internet access did not stop Geoff Nyarota, the founder of the banned Daily News -- formerly Zimbabwe's only independent daily -- from setting up another online publication in October 2006, thezimbabwetimes.com.

"We are elated that we are able to join and to complement the effort of the growing family of independent internet-based Zimbabwean publications, all contributing in their own way to the crusade to keep Zimbabweans well-informed as is their democratic right," the website announced.

While the foreign-based websites are serving a useful function, the fact that few have any advertising and some are donor-supported has led to questions around whose interests they serve. Many have been criticised by communications academics for being anti-government "soap boxes" that are not well-placed to engage in fair and balanced reporting.

But London-based Gerry Jackson, whose SW Radio Africa offers audio streaming through its website, says the Zimbabwe story provides little scope for balance. "It is primarily a story of a government oppressing its people," she argues.

Another criticism is that the foreign-based news websites operate far from the local reality, making them prone to telling only part of the story while being detached and largely unaccountable to the society they serve.

In addition, the MMPZ has noticed a trend towards "cut-and-paste" journalism driven by the pressure to satisfy audiences with content that is regularly updated, even though most of the sites do not have the resources to do the original reporting required.

Some have weakened their credibility by "carrying stories that are evidently inaccurate and biased, or rely far too heavily on unidentified sources," according to the MMPZ. In many ways such stories are an excuse for the government's stranglehold on news and information, says Foster Dongozi, secretary general of the Zimbabwe Union of Journalists.

But Francis Mdlongwa, former editor of an independent weekly, The Financial Gazette, (which in recent months was reported to have been taken over by the present governor of the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe and personal banker to President Robert Mugabe) feels that some of these websites strive for professionalism under difficult conditions.

He notes that, as with most commercial news operations, they face immense pressure to be "first with the news", a practice which at times leads to sensational or inaccurate reportage. More controversial stories have included an article about the alleged lover of First Lady Grace, which was broken by Johannesburg-based zimonline.com when it debuted in July 2004.

Most sites are not "dedicated online publications carrying real-time news as events unfold," adds Mdlongwa who now heads the Sol Plaatje Institute for Media Leadership at South Africa's Rhodes University.

On a lighter note: "Some of the websites... find time to run 'brights' -- humorous stories -- in the midst of Zimbabwe's accelerating economic and political difficulties," he says.

Until recently, the government had largely turned a blind eye towards these online publications. But African Media Barometer says a proposed new law, the Interception of Communications Bill, will "definitely affect online publications", placing them at risk of "being filtered out by the internet service providers".

Yet media expert Tawana Kupe adds that the government's intention might be merely to engender self-censorship by giving the impression that monitoring is taking place.

Since 2000, Zimbabwe's once-prosperous economy has been on a downhill spiral triggered by the appropriation of land owned by minority white farmers. Many blame President Mugabe for playing the race card as he faced the prospect of losing power to a strong opposition party for the first time since coming to power in 1980.

Accused of rigging three general elections in the past six years, the government has become associated with wanton human rights abuses and failing to stem the collapse of national institutions. Poverty levels have escalated, worsened by the world's highest inflation rate of 1,200 percent, together with shortages of fuel and basic commodities.

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