Questions for discussion

• How should the MDA address the challenge of creating greater diversity in print?
• How should the MDA be structured to address diversity in the print sector?
• Which print projects should it support? How?
• How should the print industry conribute to the support of new media? What role should the MDA play?
• What could be the relationship between the MDA and the Print Media Diversity Fund?
  

Presentation of group discussion by Mark Weinberg, Print Media Diversity Fund

Listening to the other groups, in our group there was a very large degree of consensus on what seemed to be quite contentious issues in other groups. I'll quickly run through how we addressed the various questions that were put to us.

The first question was: What would the MDA do in terms of print. We felt it needed to address the six areas that had been identified previously. The one was the question of distribution and there, networks would need to be established or incentives would need to be given to existing distribution companies to roll out their services.

The establishing of an alternative advertising agency was seen as critical in terms of sustaining the print projects. Similarly, alternative repro and printing facilities in key areas needed to be established to break the monopolies in those industries.

Then the question of seed capital which is self explanatory, and the fact that the MDA would need to co-ordinate training for print projects was seen as really the areas that an MDA would operate in. In terms of the structure of an MDA, there seemed to be consensus about the fact that the MDA would need to be statutory and it would need to be independent from government. So what we are proposing would be your Section, Chapter 9 institutions for an MDA.

We had a debate about, to what extent the MDA would have a developmental role which would just be facilitating the growth of new publications or to what extent it would also have a regulatory role which would be assessing the diversity within the broader print industry including existing publications, similar to the role presently played by the IBA which would also regulate existing things like 702 and the SABC in terms of their licence agreements. That debate wasn't really resolved. I think it's something that's new to a lot of us and we just want to put it out there for discussion.

How would the MDA be funded? People came up with the idea of a tax on advertising, a tax on profit, also the idea of tax cuts incentives, lowering the import, whatever, on paper, and so on. So probably a cocktail of incentives and tax obligations. Funding would come from the local industry in that manner but also through government and international aid agencies.

Coming back to this debate of regulation, the question was asked about the relationship between the IBA and the MDA. I think Lebu's commission touched on that. Also the need to establish - we were now exploring the regulatory role of the agency beyond the developmental role and the need for an anti trust or anti competition component we saw as being quite critical to development of new print media. So in that respect the MDA would clearly have to have a regulatory capacity.

Distribution networks, I think I've touched on.

Who should receive assistance from an MDA? We again debated it and didn't come to any clear conclusions. We felt it was an area that needed research. We felt the obvious starting place would be to just open the doors for applications and see what came, but obviously within those applications some policies would need to be developed to say whether we prioritise, for example, rural publications over small town publications, and so on. But we didn't reach any concrete conclusion there.

The other critical area is getting the appropriate media for the appropriate area, not to insist on covering the country in print where radio might be a more appropriate format. But again, people were making arguments for the necessity of print in terms of encouraging literacy which is one our key developmental stumbling blocks. And there were some debates about whether it's the responsibility of the MDA to encourage literacy. I think that was resolved by saying, not entirely the MDA but in partnership with other agencies and NGOs working in the literacy area, the MDA does have some responsibility as part of its function.

I'm moving very fast. I'm sure there'll be a number of additions, through you, Chair.

Then I think the final emphasis we wanted to put was on the need for research, an ongoing research into ownership and control of the entire industry so that in fact the MDA would become an authority on the state of diversity and development in the country and would be able to release annual reports that covered not only the small upcoming projects but the entire industry. I hope I've done a little to answer those questions.