China’s Media in Africa: Expansion, Perception and Reception

The first guest speaker event I attended this academic year was one by Herman Wasserman, who was talking about his research project on China’s Media in Africa. Upon hearing the title, I was unsure as to what this topic would be about, because it is not something I had heard of before. The following presentation provided me with a new look at the world and opened my eyes to how there are different media “issues” in different parts of the world. According to Wasserman, an issue there is how Chinese Media had integrated itself into Africa’s media and taken charge.

Due to being brought up in an extremely well developed and heavily media based country, I do sometimes forget that the media works differently in each country. I’m used to seeing the UK getting new first hand. I see news reporters from the UK travel around the world to provide us with news. What I forget is that places like South Africa have to get their news from second hand media sources. It’s strange and actually quite sad that they don’t have the money or recourses to report news from all over the world, in their own way, rather than relying on Western Media to portray the news through their eyes.

Wasserman spoke with passion during this talk and it was most likely through his own enthusiasm that I took an interest in this issue. His research expanded to many different areas and was extremely thorough. This talk opened up my mind up to the idea of perhaps following a goal of conducting my own research report about the media in other countries. If this talk taught me anything, it’s that the media is very different wherever you go, and that there are so many media stories waiting to explored and investigated.  

Johnny Fewings Media Consultancy

Johnny Fewings has had a lot of experience in film producing under Universal Pictures. He currently manages the acquisitions, which means he knows what a film should look like in order to gain a profit. His talk gave a great insight into the world of producing films and the importance of budget control and funding. While I may not necessarily be in charge of budgeting if I went into the film industry, it’s interesting to hear about the basics of budgeting films. I gathered from his talk that perhaps the most expensive part of creating a film is the talent. Having a “famous” face in a movie means an already established fan base will go see that film, along with new audiences as well. However, unless you have connections this can be expensive. This was important information to me, because it stresses the importance of having connections with people in the media industry. You can ask for favours or even work out friendlier/cheaper deals. This is one piece of information that I believe can be applied throughout the media industry, that having connections brings solutions to problems.

Andrew Smith – A-Vision

Andrew Smith acted as quite an inspirational guest speaker, due to the fact that he had finished Communications Studies with a 2:1 honours. This means that I could possibly get a job similar to his in the future through my degree. I’d never heard of A-vision before, but clearly it is a well accomplished company with people who are filled with creativity. This talk about A-vision showed me the wider world of advertising. I was in awe to see how they’d created a book with a screen inside that played a video advertising a hotel. It’s such a unique idea that I was actually quite inspired to achieve this level of creativity in the future.

I also found it quite useful that Andrew spoke about what employers look for. Some points were fairly obvious, such as being good at organisation and problem solving, but others were more useful. Industry awareness is obviously important, but it was interesting to know that Andrew knows how to tell if people have copy and pasted a general letter when they apply. He stressed how important it was to know the context the employer is working in and what they are working on. You need to know what your applying for, but I learnt from this talk that the best thing I can do is educate myself about said industry, what they have produced and to talk passionately about why you do/don’t like about their products.