Bettina Peters used her keynote at the Future of Journalism conference in Cardiff in 2009 to ask what media development actually means. As director of the Global Forum for Media Development, a network of some 500 media assistance organisations worldwide, she had reason to want the term pinned down.
The inherited answers were institutional. In the American model, media development meant encouraging private news outlets to be established. The European version added institutions to support diversity and pluralism. Both came with training for media professionals, reform of media law and investment in infrastructure such as television transmitters.
Peters set that against the conditions of 2009: falling sales and advertising, continued concentration of media ownership, and declining investment in journalism. Her question was whether media development therefore needed new forms, such as training citizen journalists, and her answer was yes. Her example was Sri Lanka, where citizens rather than the established media were supplying much of the information about what was happening. She argued too that media development should look at new funding sources, possibly hybrid or public-private ones. Legal reform was the constant: freedom of information and internet censorship remained live problems across many developing countries.
Through the GFMD she was mapping media development globally so that practitioners could compare notes. Her closing appeal was for more exchange between the developed and developing world, on the argument that media professionals in the North have things to learn from colleagues in the South.