The Botswana Editors Forum (BEF) celebrated its 20th anniversary in style at a colourful ceremony jointly held to bid the outgoing Chairperson, Spencer Mogapi, farewell.
Mogapi, the Editor of The Telegraph Newspaper and Deputy Editor at Sunday Standard left the newsroom last year after 25 years as a journalist.
Speaking at the ceremony the newly elected BEF Chairperson, Emang Mutapati, said the organisation was made up of but not limited to Editors, senior executives in the newsroom as well as educators.
She said in the 20 years of their existence, they have worked hard and achieved a lot of milestones to protect media freedom.
“Our latest success last year was when we successfully negotiated with the government to roll back the controversial provisions of the 2022 Criminal Procedure and Evidence Act which sought to allow warrantless surveillance. We have also carried out, with the support of our stakeholders like BURS, countless number of trainings to equip our journalists to practice ethical reporting,” said Mutapati.
Mogapi said there are many reasons why he left journalism and that one of those was to be able to publicly share his opinion without it being linked to editorial positions of the Sunday Standard and The Telegraph.
He said the trend the world over is that full time editorial staff should not be involved in the op-ed sections.
“Other newsrooms have gone further to run op-eds separately from the newsrooms. I’m saying this because it is important for editors to appraise themselves of the fast changing trends in journalism. We cannot afford to have editors still clinging to how they did things when they joined journalism forty years ago. The digital world is transforming journalism in ways that could not have been foreseen a few years back. So please keep in touch with these new digital trends,” said Mogapi.
He went on to say Editors should strive to increase diversity and pluralism in the national discourse.
Mogapi said it is wrong for a newsroom to interview the same people every week, sometimes the same person for more than one story per edition.
He said Editors should also find it wrong when a picture of one person appears more than once in the pages of one edition.
“Editors should actively seek to put new voices into the mainstream. Only such diversity will for example help editors to fully understand the country and the nation that they are covering. I am worried that at the moment newsrooms and especially the editors do not have a thorough grasp of the identity, the aspirations, the fears and the ambitions of the voter who will be turning up at the polls in October next year,” he added.
