Searching for the Swedish president

On Tuesday, the participants got as homework to read and analyze and reflect on a speech by Rupert Murdoch given to American newspaper editors in 2005. Murdoch’s prophetic speech more than seven years back was about the increased use of the internet, especially among the younger generation in the USA, and the consequences this would have on the newspaper industry over there and later also elsewhere.

As many readers surely know, Rupert Murdoch is a famous media mogul, the chief executive of News Corporation, and one of the biggest individual media owners in the world, owner of not only dozens of print newspapers in the USA, UK and Australia, but also owner of Fox Channel, Sky TV and many, many other big TV channels around the world.

For quite fluent summaries about the speech and views of Rupert Murdoch, see for example the postings of Hamisi Kibari of Habari Leo, Mcharo Mrutu from Channel Ten, Nurdin Selemani of RFI Kiswahili, or Zuhura Selemani, University of Dar es Salaam School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

Yesterday morning after posting the Murdoch stories, we worked a bit on the blogs, arranged the blog settings, learnt how to make links to other web pages, and all participants also added a link list with links to the blogs of their other colleagues attending the training.

The rest of the day, we spent searching for information from the web, starting with simple fact-finding, such as populations of Tanzanian towns or other countries, contact information of local institutions and embassies, and names of presidents in other countries. More funny or tricky assignments were to find the phone number of Barack Obama (the idea was to simply go to the website of the White House), the name of the president of Sweden (they have no president but a king, and the prime minister is the real political leader), and who were the goal scorers of Celtic in their UEFA Champions League match against Juventus on Tuesday night (no-one from Celtic scored any goal as they lost the match 0-3).

Some other assignments, like the current inflation rate in Tanzania (12.1 percent last December) and what exactly president Jakaya Kikwete said earlier in the week about the religious violence in Geita region, were a bit more challenging. The difficulty was to narrow the search by using alternative Google options, such as Google news, or to search results only from Tanzanian or Kiswahili language websites, or from websites from last month or last week only.

Asia Khalfan, managing editor of the radio channel Sauti ya Quran (Voice of the Koran), says in her blog that she liked the fact-finding assignments, because before this session such Google search were difficult for her. Athumani Shariff, lecturer at Dar es Salaam School of Journalism, enjoyed especially how to make links to the blog texts, something he says that most Tanzanian bloggers don’t seem to know how to do. Here’s another short summary from yesterday’s training by Mcharo Mrutu, and here’s a more detailed explanation of some of the search assignments by Nurdin Selemani.