Social media is an integral part of the output for any contemporary media house. For established media companies to survive and thrive they need to embrace social media platforms as an intrinsic part of their daily editorial, production & commissioning processes.

In June 2019, twenty-four journalists and media makers from the Southern African region (Botswana, Lesotho, Mozambique, Namibia, Seychelles, South Africa and Zimbabwe) gathered in Windhoek, Namibia, to strengthen the capacity of media in the region by creating and adopting a clear plan on the use of social media in news and broadcasting.

They worked collaboratively to develop these detailed, regionally relevant guidelines on aspects of social media coverage that they could use within their organisations. These guidelines were also produced to strengthen the role of the media in Southern Africa and promote the positive use of social media within newsrooms and media organisations.

These guidelines:

  • Cover activities on a media organisation’s social media sites and external sites by journalists and employees of the organisation.
  • Exist to ensure that your social media output is as good as it can be and does not do anyone any harm.
  • Serve to protect employees as well as the organisations they work for to facilitate responsible journalism

This important project and guidelines was run by the Public Media Alliance with support and funding from UNESCO’s International Programme for the Development of Communication (IPDC), UNESCO Harare and UNESCO Namibia. Our thanks to the workshop trainers Emily-May Brown, Senior Lecturer at the Namibia University of Science and Technology (NUST) and Robert Freeman, trainer in social media and digital journalism at the BBC College of Journalism.

Discover more PMA guidelines

Header Image: The map of the world represented by illuminated digital connections. 3D image with depth of field on a LED screen. Credit: ktsimage/iStock