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More than 600 journalists from all over Africa gathered at the beginning of September, as every year since 1997, in South Africa’s Grahamstown to participate in the annual Highway Africa Conference. This year’s conference title: Citizen Journalism & Journalism for Citizens. The delegates discussed the usage of new media like social networks, mobile communication and blogs.

More and more content is produced by ordinary citizens. What is the effect of this on Journalism and those who worked as professionals in the industry up until now? What effect does this specifically have on the situation in those African countries in which the people haven’t had proper access to information up until now, especially since they are now even enabled to produce their own content.

For the last few years KAS Media has supported Highway Africa as we did this year. Besides this support again there has been additional training for short term scholars of the Foundation in which the participants learnt all there is to know about new media. In the practical part they trained the production of blogs in order to change passive consumers of the conference into active participants who report about the occurrences at the conference.