The Journalist, The Mobile Phone and Facebook

Ngange, K. and Boateng, R. (2011) The Journalist, The Mobile Phone and Facebook,  PC Tech Magazine’s Conversations on Technology, Business and Society, Vol. 2 Issue 1, pp. 36-39.

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Kingsley Ngange is a Journalist with the Cameroon Radio Televsion Corporation (CRTV) and a lecturer of Journalism in the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Buea, Cameroon. He has been in the communication world for over a decade now. Currently, he is a visiting scholar at the Internatonal Center for Information Technology and Development (ICITD), Southern University in Baton Rouge, USA.

The mobilephone in today’s world of technology is the journalist’s companion.  It has come to solve the problem of time, especially in Africa. It is easier for a journalist using a mobilephone to report an event to transmit his/her information faster than a journalist who doesn’t. I found this very helpful when I covered the municipal and legislative elections in 2007 in Cameroon. I reported events live, as they occured with the mobile phone even in very remote areas. Without a phone it will take several hours to get to the radio and TV stations to broadcast such reports. The political parties and citizens that we served during those elections found my timely reports very helpful in passing across their vital information to the electorate. Electoral fraud and other short comings were reported and resolved immediate. This adds to the credibility of elections, thanks to mobile phones. The mobilephone also solves the problem of unnecessary gate-keeping in broadcasting information.

Another example of the usefulness of a mobilephone to me was during the violent socio-economic strike action which paralysed Cameroon for one week in February 2008. I was a journalist in the nation’s economic capital, Douala, where the strike was most severe. Different parts of the city were complete cut off, so it was the mobile phone which helped me and other journalists to communicate the actions as they unfolded and thanks to those prompt reports appropriate security measures were taken and updated. Lifes and property were saved thanks to the mobilephone. I can go on and on and on. The bottomline is that a mobilephone to me is like a farmer’s machette/cutlass or a pastor’s bible.

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