Internet is still a marginal media in South Africa, says Rachel Stewart, the SANEF online committee organizer and acting editor of Sabcnews.com. This has a negative impact on the perception of the work of online newsrooms. For example, accreditation for online journalists to various events is difficult to obtain. "For a site linked to a broadcaster, there might be TV and radio rights to an event, but not Internet," she says.
The Internet editors’ forum will be a chance for online media to find solutions to common problems, says Ms Stewart.
Other problems that online editors have in common include "training, copyright and plagiarism, privacy issues, the pressure to make money, the lack of staff and the lack of capacity to generate much original material," she says.
Concerning training, online editors have difficulties "in finding appropriate training both inhouse and externally. Quite a lot of journalists still have to be trained to use computers and especially the Internet as tools - especially those who were trained as journalists before about 1996 or so - because of the increased efficiency, the digitalisation of resources, the portability of the Net, etc.," she says.
The Internet editors’ forum will be an opportunity to persuade traditional media that all journalism training should have online journalism as an integral component, says Ms Stewart. "The idea is that the Internet is one of the platforms on which you will work and so, if you are a TV journalist, you need to know how video plays out on the Net; or a writer needs to know how a text story is best played out on the Net with all its capacities and so on. I think there is also room for people learning things like Flash and Photoshop because, even if these are graphic tools, the end product needs editorial input," she says.
The online editors’ forum intends to create a professional lobby to coordinate development strategies for the sector and also campain for better institutional support from traditional media companies.