JOHANNESBURG, September 2 – Leading African media executives are preparing to meet in Tanzania from 26-29 September for the 2010 edition of the Africa Media Leadership Conference (AMLC). This year’s summit will focus on identifying and developing “Sustainable Media Business Models in the Digital Age”.
The AMLC series – now in its ninth year – is the foremost pan-African gathering of senior media professionals, and the gathering represents a key opportunity for Africa’s most influential media leaders to discuss strategic, operational and other challenges in a fast and constantly changing media landscape.
Since its inception in 2002, the meetings have developed into an annual high-level forum for strategy formulation, networking and sharing by senior executives of print, broadcast, online and converged media on the African continent.
The conference is co-hosted by Rhodes University’s Sol Plaatje Institute for Media Leadership (SPI) and Germany’s Konrad Adenauer Stiftung (KAS), and was convened to promote high-level interaction among Africa’s media chiefs.
“This year we switch focus from a broad look at understanding and doing digital media in Africa to specifics of what works and what does not work under African conditions,” said SPI Director Francis Mdlongwa.
Frank Windeck, the director of Konrad Adenauer Stiftung’s Sub-Sahara Africa Media Programme, the sponsor of the AMLC series, said: “These meetings provide Africa’s top media people with a unique opportunity to network at the highest level, debating key industry challenges, while seeking practical solutions by examining case studies drawn from Africa.”
The conference meets annually in an African country, and past AMLC summits have debated timely topics such as “Managing Media in a Recession” (Mauritius, 2002); “South Meets East: Strategic Challenges for African Media” (Nairobi, Kenya, 2006); and “Learning from the Future: Africa’s Media Map in 2029” (Accra, Ghana, 2009).
