MEGATRENDS AND MEDIA

MEGATRENDS AND MEDIA
of media and civil society organizations are of primary importance for the
requested strategic inputs regarding CSO - media relations. The research
makes a point that fundamental problems that burden this relationship
are mainly based on the lack of knowledge and understanding about each
other and this relates to the weak capacities of the media and civil society
organizations and internal and external problems in their functioning.
The main conclusions of the report are grouped in themes (mutual visibility,
awareness, communication, trust and cooperation). These problems were
additionally elaborated and supplemented during the working groups and
frame three main problem areas that lead further to three main strategic
pillars.
The irst problem area is the lack of knowledge and understanding of
both media and CSO organisations about what is it that the other side
does and how can this can be used in activities of organisations on
both sides aiming to achieve organisational goals. This set of problems
is related to their internal procedures and processes, to the overall
environmental context but also to the lack of competences and skills of
professionals to understand how the other function operates and what
are its missions and goals. All three sources of information, (Missing link,
country meetings and workshop groups) point to the lack of knowledge
as one of the main source of misunderstanding. Media do not know
what civil society organisations do and what is their role in democracy
and civil society organisations do not know how the media function, do
not understand their priorities, and do not follow the rule of relational
communication that has been shown in previous external studies in some
countries of the considered region covered region to be the dominant
type of communication particularly in the case of communication of
civil society professional with journalists. In addition, while journalists
do not know what is it that civil society organisations do and, in the
increasingly commercialised media market, civil society organisations
do not offer them stories that sell, CSOs show, apart from not knowing
how to initiate relations with the journalists, unsatisfactory knowledge
and lack of necessary skills to master communication with the media
and use media for advocacy purposes. In essence, lack of capacity in
competencies and skills and lack of knowledge and understanding of
the overall environment in which the other side operates is one set of
problems that heavily dictates the negative score in relationship between
media and civil society organisations in the considered region.
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