A partnership between UNESCO and the Rhodes University School of Journalism and Media Studies will put the spotlight on strengthening African journalism education in September 2009.

The joint activities planned over a week-long period are:
- A special training programme to empower African journalism teachers in using New Media, to be run by Rhodes expert lecturer Jude Mathurine.
- The participants will also join a research colloquium as part of the African preparations for the World Journalism Education Congress set down for Rhodes University in July 2010.

Overall, Africa’s mobile market has probably been the fastest growing of any region in the world over the past five years, and mobile access has grown twice as rapidly as the global average.

It took the African continent 100 years to accumulate 28 million fixed lines – an average access rate of 3 per 100 inhabitants – but this was overtaken by mobile connections in 2001, and with 137 million mobile subscribers in 2005 mobiles outnumbered fixed lines by more than five to one.

“Copyright laws are turning kids into criminals”.

This claim is made by Lawrence Lessig, a Stanford law professor and an advocate of Creative Commons.

His argument is simple: Generation-Y is not going to change, so the laws will have to:

You all know the advertisement: You wouldn’t steal a car… you wouldn’t steal a mobile phone… you wouldn’t steal someone’s wallet…

And yet, recently when the people behind a torrenting site called The Pirate Bay were found guilty of copyright infringement and sentenced to pay millions and spend years in jail there was widespread outrage, even threat of Cyber War One (and not just because the site would no longer aid people in getting stuff for free).

You know the story by now. Media and journalism are in crisis as media scarcity becomes a thing of the past. In the North, fast, cheap broadband means a surfeit of media choice, content and services. While media consumption is up, 'traditional' media consumption is down (except in emerging countries).