Community Media/CLP/PartIII

Part III - Programme Development

Media channels

• Radio (also room for television)
• Radio is cheap but it still costs
• The higher production values, the higher the cost

Example: Jet-FM

• Magazine
• Multimedia: newsletter,
• Opportunities for web-based convergence; it's attractive

Popular arts

• Music
  • Traditional fork forms, pop songs

• Visual
• Drama & storytelling
  • Popular, esp. comedy
  • Street, community, popular

How do you strike a balance between entertainment and education?

• The programme cannot be entertaining enough
• How much do they engage with the programme? There is a proven correlation between what is engaging and recall

Problem: Try to teach everybody everything at the same time Risk: People enjoy but drop the message

Be entertaining not to provide entertainment - edutainment; the format needs to be entertaining

Also important to draw people in with entertainment

Engagement comes when the audience identifies with the content... How do you do this?

• Narrowcast
• Entertaining formats
• Give people content they need as (registered) learners

Example: [www.soulcity.org.za|Soul City]

• It's all research based, perhaps similar to Story Workshop
• It's expensive

Context/audience specific: what type of education is it?

• Formal
• Non-formal
• Informal

You cannot use all formats for all purposes, e.g. tabloids are not taken seriously; some soaps are considered frivolous

What vehicle works for what target group?

How do you do drama?

• How do start to help people to see the value of drama
• Develop a structure, let people improvise
• Improv works well for attitudinal learning social issues; we are all connected in some way; easy to find the conflict
• It is not as successful as with knowledge; this might require more engineered drama; more planning and development, scripting, etc.