How to Assess Your Media Landscape: A Toolkit Approach

"When issues of good governance and economic growth are discussed in the development community, the role of the media is increasingly seen as central to success....This paper presents an approach to developing a toolkit for monitoring and evaluation that will serve as a resource for media development practitioners."

This Global Forum for Media Development (GFMD) report surveys some of the instruments available for assessing media landscapes. It offers guidance on monitoring and evaluation (M&E) and shares successful M&E approaches used by others in an attempt to help advance the field of media development. The report is the first step in the GFMD's initiative to create manageable and practical tools for assessing media landscapes that: allow for comparison of media landscapes in a given country over time (rather than between countries), follow a common, simple methodology, build on local expertise and focus on locally available, reliable data. The toolkit includes 3 separate components, as well as a concluding section:

• "Assessing Your Media Landscape: Available Instruments, their Role and their Limitations", by Fackson Banda and Guy Berger, Rhodes University - "This knowledge resource... sets out advice around clarifying your focus, and how this impacts upon choosing, creating and using the best tools for assessing some aspect of the media landscape....For instance, ...it could be that media literacy is your primary concern for emphasis and that you want to elaborate a tool for this. That's different from say, concerns about media that emanate from specifically taking up the viewpoint of children. From a very wide field, you need to zoom in carefully before you start imitating existing tools."
• "A Framework for an Assessment Toolkit", by Mark Whitehouse, IREX - "The proposed framework provides an organizing approach to examining a media sector by looking at 5 key areas internal to a media system: 1. the legal and regulatory framework; 2. the quality of journalism; 3. the availability of news and information to citizens; 4. the business of media; and 5. the supporting institutions. This paper, as a first step towards generating a toolkit, discusses an approach for the legal and regulatory framework and the quality of journalism. In addition, the paper argues that three external factors should be examined - political, economic, and socio-demographic."
• "Monitoring Impact: The Spheres of Influence Approach", by A.S. Panneerselvan and Lakshmi Nair, Panos South Asia (PSA) - This part of the resource outlines the measurement of PSA's spheres of influence within 5 categories: (i) media (ii) communities whose voices are articulated through PSA's programmes (iii) civil society partners (iv) academia (v) state actors/policymakers.

An excerpt from the conclusion section, by Bettina Peters of GFMD, follows:

"...[T]here is no need to reinvent wheels when you decide to do an assessment of media. On the other hand, it does help if you know the range of 'wheels' that is on offer. And it helps even more if you know who manufactured them, what size they are, and for what purpose they were originally designed. To this end, in choosing criteria for any assessment tool, this report recommends the need for a clear decision about the scope of the assessment; an open declaration of value positions; clarity about the cause-effect aspects of the assessment; clarification of utilitarian concerns; inclusion of distinctive indicators of measurement; practicality of the assessment tool; and longevity of time-frame.

Secondly, the report addresses the question of implementing an assessment exercise. Here, it tackles the need for triangulating qualitative and quantitative assessment approaches, highlighting why each of these methodological approaches is important to the task of assessing the complexity of media development. Although most media development assessments tend towards the qualitative approach, this study calls for a purposive triangulation that incorporates aspects of methodological, ethnographical, geographical and gender triangulation. This is aimed at enhancing the assessment tool's representativeness, credibility, dependability and conformability.

Thirdly, as a way of further enhancing data quality assurance, the report focuses on the need for a more ethnographic process of interpreting the results of the assessment, including ensuring that the final assessment product is 'owned' by the various stakeholders involved in the assessment process. Associated with this collectivist process of data interpretation and report-writing is the need for developing and elaborating clear post-publication publicity and advocacy plans and activities. Such post-publication planning should not be seen as instrumentalist; it is an organic part of validating the findings of the assessment exercise.

It is clear that assessing media development is much more than just a research activity; it is both a technocratic process of enquiry and a conscious act of intervention in remedying the problems brought to light as a result of the assessment exercise."

Click here to access the GFMD website.