Glamour, Internet, and Danger to life. WEMF 4 BEGINS

WEMF 4 began in style.  The conference room was expensively dressed for television programme production by the national Mexican broadcaster, Televisa.   The two-handed opening moderation was done by glamorous local TV anchor Paola Rojas, and the sober-male TV anchor Sergio Sarmiento from the other national network.  This was bound to be newsworthy, and at one point there seemed as many press photographers and TV cameramen in the room as conference participants.    Projecting this forward, if a future conference has participants which are all press photographers and TV cameramen, would this work?

The opening session was intended to set the scene and highlight key issues, with each broadcasting union saying what they thought was important for the conference to solve. A range of local broadcast managers explained how they saw things, as did the relevant Mexican government minister, and a senior man at the UN.

David Lewis from the EBU reminded the conference of the mortal danger journalists’ face in some countries – in the absence of any wars.  By his calculation, Mexico itself holds the highest risk of life for journalists of any country in the western world.   Later, the Minister gave a frank reply.    Mexico has changed to a country with complete freedom of speech, but at the same time has seen organized crime.  The window was opened and bad as well as good came in.   But this, we were assured, will change.

The UN presentation too (Mr. Akasaka) was impressive.   The purpose of the conference should be clear:  “to shape the future of broadcasting and broadband for the benefit of all mankind”.  But what, your blogger thought, are we going to do after lunch?   The UN down to earth analysis of the situation was startling.  Only 15% of the developing world has any access to Internet, and they pay much more than the developed world for access.  The poorest people pay the highest costs.   There are more broadband connections in even a small developed country like Australia that in the whole of Africa.

He also stressed the priority of the protection of journalists.  His epithet that ‘no news is bad news when there are atrocities’ rang in all our ears.

Paolo and Sergio went back to their TV studios leaving many problems to solve.

The next session looked at the oncoming train of broadband and its effects on broadcasting – friend or foe?  Predictably everyone argued that broadcasters have to accept the inevitable and work with broadband, not against it.   Broadcasters have to move from using Internet for promotion to providing real services.  One worrying fact was that companies which are embedded in one world rarely see the future coming and make a success of it.   We have to hope broadcasters are different from saddle makers, and can move on to make cars.

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