By George Esunge Fominyen
Timothy Kasolo is a Zambian journalist cum entrepreneur cum blogger. He was recently in Dakar to collect an award (coupled with a $2000 cheque) on behalf of lusakatimes.com. This online/citizen media project had won the prize for the Best African Civil Society Organization’s Blog in the Waxal Blogging Africa Awards.
The ceremony included a debate on the marriage between blogging and journalism. So how do the likes of Timothy deal with this union? I stole into Timothy's time at the reception (with clicking plates and spoons in the background) for a conversation on the matter. One thing he said was that journalists need to be trained to be good bloggers but started by introducing lusakatimes.com...
The team at LusakaTimes describes their "baby" as an electronic news platform that allows all types of users to have an open discussion on the day to day current issues in Zambia. It is run by a number of people distributed around the world, working in an open source type of structure, purely driven by hobby and ambition to provide Zambians around the world with current news content based on facts and not speculation.
Their day to day news content comes from known Zambian sources like Zambia Daily-Mail, Times of Zambia, ZNBC and ZANIS. Additionally, Lusakatimes also provides a platform for any Zambian who wants their article published, provided they take full ownership and responsibility of the content.
Hello,
I've tried to build something like LusakaTimes with www.20mai.net, and I'll be happy to have partnership with you in order to launch it.
And I create a blogging platform (at www.kmerblog.com ) to allow journalist to blog more.
Regards,
Nino
Posted by: Nino | May 01, 2009 at 12:40 PM
Salut Nino,
Great idea you've got going.
Keep it up.
Posted by: George Esunge Fominyen | May 28, 2009 at 10:59 AM