Rival Pacific media bodies to merge
Title -- 3876 REGION: Rival Pacific media bodies to merge
Date -- 12 December 2002
Byline -- None
Origin -- Pacific Media Watch
Source -- Radio Australia's Pacific Beat, 11/12/2
Copyright -- RA
Status -- Unabridged
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PACIFIC MEDIA BODIES TO MERGE
abc.net.au/ra/pacbeat/stories/s745341.htm
The two major media organisations in the South Pacific - the Pacific Islands
News Association (PINA) and the Pacific Islands Broadcasting Association
(PIBA) - seem set to merge, ending what at times has appeared to be almost a
war between their respective secretariats.
Presenter/Interviewer: Sean Dorney, Pacific Correspondent.
Speakers: Johnson Honimae, President of the Pacific Islands News
Association.
DORNEY: The Canberra meeting was to help AusAID with the preliminary design
of a new phase of an assistance project aimed at helping the media in the
Pacific promote effective governance throughout the region.
One issue is effective governance within the Pacific media itself and the
president of the Pacific Islands News Association (PINA), Johnson Honimae,
told the workshop real progress was being made towards uniting PINA and the
Pacific Islands Broadcasting Association (PIBA), to eliminate waste and
duplication.
HONIMAE: "At the PINA conference last year in Madang, Papua New Guinea, the
members gave a mandate, a very strong mandate, to my executive that we must
merge the Pacific Islands News association (PINA) and PIBA, the Pacific
Islands Broadcasting Association. They've been talking about this merger for
years now so at this conference last year they said something must happen.
"So I have taken that on and I'm now working closely with the acting
chairman of the PIBA, Francis Herman, who's the acting CEO of FBCL (Fiji
Broadcasting Corporation Ltd) and we 're seriously looking at it and we're
looking at it happening - at least a structure in place, a draft structure a
constitution in place before the next PINA conference to be held in Apia,
Samoa, at the end of July, beginning of August, next year."
DORNEY: What are the advantages?
HONIMAE: "At the moment members of PINA, some of them are also members of
PIBA. There seems to have been some duplication. So that's one. Also, over
the years, aid donors' funds into funding media projects has dwindled a bit
as priorities of aid donors change and the focus goes to other areas of the
world. So the funding, we need to work together so that whatever funding we
get, our members get the maximum benefit out of it.
"So those two are the main two reasons - quite a lot of duplication and of
course because of the limited funds there's not the same people fighting
over the same money."
DORNEY: The acting chairman of the Pacific Islands Broadcasting Association,
PIBA, is Francis Herman from Fiji.
HERMAN: "As PIBA, we've consulted the executives of PIBA, the elected
executives and I think for a long time as few of us have been wanting a
merger between the two major media organisations and that's a logical
transition.
"For a long time, as far back as I can remember - the last decade at least -
donor agencies, governments have been saying, 'why don't you guys merge?
It's become very difficult to fund two organisations.' So the merger will
augur well for us - for Pacific Islands' media in terms of funding."
DORNEY: PIBA produces PACNEWS, a three bulletins a day subscription news
service while PINA produces PINA Online News (sic - PINA Nius Online), a free distribution to PINA
members of daily news items, mostly drawn from the region's press. Both PIBA
and PINA have secretariats based in Suva and relationships between them have
not been good. In fact, at times they've been almost poisonous. I asked
Johnson Honimae what a merger would mean for the two secretariats.
HONIMAE: "Basically if this merger happens we cannot have two secretariats.
We will have to have a single secretariat. So the plan is for the two
executives, the two elected executives from PIBA and PINA to get together
and we have a put a proposal through the Forum Secretariat in order to have
a meeting of the two executives so that we can thrash these issues out, put
something in place and take it to Apia.
"So to answer your question, if it's going to be a new organisation
basically it will have only one secretariat."
DORNEY: How would a new secretariat for a unified Pacific media body be
created?
HONIMAE: "This is thinking now - of course it will have to go before this
meeting of the two executives - an idea would be, because it's a new
organisation, let's advertise the jobs within the region and see what the
response is going to be like."
DORNEY: Mr Honimae and Mr Herman received a very positive hearing from
AusAID when it came to their request for funding to help this proposed
meeting of the elected executives of both PINA and PIBA.
HONIMAE: "And I think they will look at any proposal we will put to them and
that is basically what both of us are going to do now. We've got contacts in
AUSAID. Hopefully we can put something together and put it to AUSAID at the
end of this year. We would like something to happen in the first quarter of
next year.
PACIFIC MEDIA WATCH is an independent, non-profit, non-government organisation comprising journalists, lawyers, editors and other media workers, dedicated to examining issues of ethics, accountability, censorship, media freedom and media ownership in the Pacific region. Launched in October 1996, it has links with the Journalism Program at the University of the South Pacific, Bushfire Media based in Sydney, Journalism Studies at the University of PNG (UPNG), the Australian Centre for Independent Journalism (ACIJ), Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand, and Community Communications Online (c2o).
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