Media Management in the New Age: How managers lead media in Southern and Eastern Africa

The Sol Plaatje Institute (SPI) for Media Leadership at Rhodes University launched this book at this year’s annual Highway Africa Conference. It was co-edited by Johanna Mavhungu and Robert G Picard with editorial assistance from Herman Wasserman. The SPI’s core focus is media management, leadership, and business in media and specifically in journalism and it studies the whole business environment and how it is managed for the benefit of journalism. “In looking at the business and economics of community media organisations, the Institute also looks at the resources available to these organisations, because without good assets “you lose all the good values of journalism,” This book marks a critical step by Africans to define and domesticate media management and leadership in Africa at a time of frenetic change. It fosters greater knowledge and understanding of what media management entails under African circumstances. It adopts a case study approach and starts an important conversation allowing media managers to share and understand successes and failures as gleaned from the case studies. It also highlights the need for African media firms to establish equal and equitable representation of men and women in newsrooms and management and to develop policies that enforce this.

Publisher: Sol Plaatjie Institute for Media Leadership
Year of Publication: 2013