Kwame Dadzie
ENTERTAINMENT JOURNALIST, Kwame Dadzie, has responded to growing allegations that Ghanaian media fails to support local artistes and creatives when they have projects to promote. The comments follow complaints from some industry players who say their work is overlooked.
In a post on Facebook, Kwame Dadzie created a scenario of how artistes lament: “I toured Europe and performed to big audiences, but the Ghanaian media didn’t talk about it. These media people will never talk about the good things we do. I am surprised no blogger or journalist has said anything about this Ghanaian film making it big at an international film festival.”
Kwame Dadzie, in response, said the reality is different. According to him, most journalists in the culture and arts space genuinely want to highlight good news about Ghanaians. “The reality is that a lot of Ghanaian journalists in the culture and arts space would want to write or talk about any good thing happening about their own. Most times, we do stories for people in the industry on our own volition,” he disclosed.
However, he explained that the media has limitations. “The media is not omniscient or omnipresent. We are not magicians. We can’t know everything happening in the world. We can only report on what we have seen or discovered,” he stressed.
Kwame Dadzie noted that the rise of digital platforms has made it even harder for individual projects to stand out, “especially in the new media era, where so many things are happening at the same time on the internet; the good thing you are doing is likely to be drowned out because the space is crowded. Everybody is a writer now. Everybody is a blogger. Every social media user is producing content. You will be lost in the crowd if you don’t intentionally project yourself or what you do.”
He added that artistes and creatives must take responsibility for promoting their own work. “The long and short of plenty English I am typing is that if you are doing something and you have not intentionally developed a Public Relation (PR) strategy for it, don’t expect it to automatically get media attention. If, by happenstance, you get earned media, thank God for it. But that doesn’t usually happen. Let’s not underrate PR.
“It is easier for your work to get media coverage when you present it to a journalist or blogger than to wait for them to find out about it. If they don’t find out, your work possibly dies out,” he added.
BY Prince Fiifi Yorke