Peace Journalist, a Community Media role model to a better society.

Community Media (CM) are any form of media that function in service of or by a community. A community in this sense can refer to a geographical area, a cultural identity or another concept linking people together. Community media represent a separate entity and are fundamentally different from public media.

Participants at workshop

The CM can take all the forms of other conventional media, such as print, radio, television, blog, Web-based and mixed media.
Community radios are particularly widespread around the world with radio stations being funded to inform their listeners on issues important to the community.

 Their services are very important in giving communities a platform to express their concerns for local issues, engage in social democratic debates and deliver a reliable access to information. This explains why the people identify more with it.

Majority of the Cameroonian population is yet to embrace the social media. Having in mind that the social media propagates mostly unverified information, the importance of the community media can not be over emphasized.

CM better known as grassroots media is focused more specifically on media making by and for the local community that it serves. It makes the discussion more narrow and precise to the understanding of the common man. It is essentially a subset focusing on small scale media projects which aim to bring different visions and perspectives to the "codes" that are so easily embedded in the social psyche.

Group picture participants NW/West.

The above explains why the Cameroon Community Media Network (CCMN), an initiative of the Communication Department of the P.C.C, brought together some 50 practitioners from the communities of the NW and West regions of Cameroon. The media men and women were schooled on Peace Journalism, social media, crisis, refugees, IDPs and Elections reporting.

The peace journalism Professor and Director of the Center for Global Peace Journalism and Crisis Reporting (Steven Youngblood), expanded on the technics and language journalist could/should use in their reports on their mediums to report during crisis and elections.

The expectations of this Bafoussam workshop which lasted for 3 days  are that, media persons put to adequate use the principles of peace journalism (good journalism) to adequately inform their masses so that they make informed choices.

                                           Ambe Macmillian A.