East Africa’s powerful media house, The Nation group, celebrated its 50th birthday last week with a major media conference (see www.panafricamedia2010kenya.com )

Adding continental aspects to the event were two influential bodies that partnered with it: The Africa Media Initiative, a body that is gaining momentum in its quest to become a facility for attracting major funding into the continent’s media sector. Highway Africa( see www.highwayafrica.com ), which operates the world’s largest annual gathering of African journalists, and which launched its “Reporting Development News Agency” at the conference (see http:/reportingdna.org). The gathering drew a host of African politicians as speakers, including Kenya’s top leadership, the Rwandan president and the former leaders of Mozambique and Tanzania.

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As individuals, South Africa’s journalists express themselves in media platforms around the clock. But for the past five years, they’ve lacked a collective professional voice.

This may be about to change, with the launch this coming weekend of the Professional Journalists’ Association (see www.projourn.org.za) . The South African Union of Journalists (SAUJ) closed down five years ago. The Media Workers Association of South Africa (MWASA) is very much broader than journalists, while also limited to concerns like labour disputes. Special interest groups like the Forum of Black Journalists rise and fall. In the past, the journalists’ unions strutted on the national stage, for example in being parties to setting up the Press Ombudsman office in 1996, and in giving testimony to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1997.

The PJA plans to revive this kind of public sphere presence. [more]