Fostering a better media culture | Daily News
Formation of National Institute of Media Studies and Research

Fostering a better media culture

One of the main aims and objectives, as laid down in the Vistas of Prosperity and Splendour (Saubhagye Dekma), is the formation of a professional media culture in the country in order to help develop and uplift the present state of media activities. This may tend to bring about a gradual change of the present stagnant forms of media status. The goodwill message has been passed down to the public in order to create an awareness of the formation of a national institute that will help mould this mission on the part of the Mass Media Minister as well as the Secretary and the Additional Secretary concerned. Over a period of about six months, a number of sessions were held at the Ministry Auditorium as well as the Sri Lanka Foundation Institute Auditorium in order to formulate the basis of a National Institute.

This has paved the way to a selected steering body that, over a period of at least one and a half years, had been engaged in the function of formulation of the needed Institutional Structured Body in collaboration with similar institutional establishments all around the globe. The end result is the formation of the prestigious National Institute of Media Studies and Research (NIMSR). This may sound somewhat strange at a glance. 

State of professionalism

But the fact remains that quite a number of intellectuals in the field of Social Sciences and Humanities at the University level of education and other levels of higher status in various other seats of learning have agreed that the basic training and research target in media training would lead to a state of professionalism it deserves as a pressing need of the country at large. The basic ideology may not be fulfilled by the higher seats of learning where the universities matter very much. As such, the need for a well-structured seat of learning in Media Studies and Research linked to the same is observed as a need of time. In this direction, the steering committee, it is observed, has taken pains to collect all the necessary documents from various other countries that had exercised similar academic and practical training over the years. As a triggering point, the NIMSR has laid down in the sessions that followed the basic groundwork needed to clarify what professionalism means at the outset. As the country needs better-trained media personalities, an action plan has been laid down before the public as an eye-opener. 

The action plan consists of a well-formulated and planned course of studies not confined to narrow academic know-how in theoretical perspectives but vistas that lead to a wider scope of holding discourses, seminars, presentations of papers, practical ways and means of exercises in the information process. Workshops and discourses on the aspects of ethics, law and regulatory issues as linked to Media as well as Information Technology. 

Pedagogical areas

The lessons will not be confined to some pedagogical areas of tradition that found an emphasis on people, places and events. The selected students and/or participants will be given the opportunity to know areas such as the more modern forms of communication patterns, ideologies and the issues connected in each of these segments. The participant may also have the chance of entering into the realms of narratology, and forms of feature writing with better insights and resulting in a higher form of crucial and creative thinking that transcends the barriers of mere learning. The participant may also have the chance of participating in regional media encounters as time permits in order to create a better awareness in a globalised climate of opinion making. 

As the term ‘journalism’ has transcended the mere barriers of a commonplace profession, an individual who participates may have the opportunity of encountering an exchange programme, for better professional training. Apart from holding mere certificates and diploma courses, the NIMSR anticipates the higher forms of courses that will lead to research projects that could be conducted either in groups or as individuals. As such, the expectations are enormous as learning outcomes. 

Over the years quite a number of Media training units indeed sprang up as linked to the broadcasting stations, television stations and Newspaper firms. Further training in it was formed by individuals in the training of specified areas such as writing, announcing, reporting form and performances. 

Social interaction

According to the mentors of the Steering Committee of NIMSR, a genuine effort is promoted to meet the demands and requirements in the moulding of better media personalities are needed at the moment of our existence. As visualised in the UNESCO, Many Voices One World communication is at the heart of all social intercourse. Whenever men have come to establish regular relations with one another, the nature of the systems of communications created between them, the forms they have taken and the measures of effectiveness they have attained have largely determined the chances of bringing communities closer together or of making them one, and the prospects for reducing tensions or setting conflicts wherever they have arisen. 

This verdict as well as the observation of UNESCO seems to be the guiding spectrum of the background, knowledge of the formulation of the new Institute. 

Scientific planning and the formulation of newly carved methods tend to overcome the obstacles and impediments that may arise. But perhaps the lapse of time may prove the worth of NIMSR in the field of Communication Studies.


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