"Ashoka is an organization that supports social entrepreneurs around the world and has the longest track record of doing so. It has identified and supported over 3,500 “Ashoka Fellows,” many of whom are in the media sector. Therefore, Ashoka sits on a treasure trove of data on transformative med
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ia innovations. We analyzed this data to understand how social entrepreneurs around the world are trying to improve the media landscape, assessed the most successful approaches, and identified gaps that social entrepreneurship has not yet filled. To do so, we selected a subset of Ashoka Fellows whose primary aim is to improve the media landscape and who are demonstrably making a substantial impact. We call them “Core Media Fellows” and selected them from an initial pool of 231 Fellows, after gathering extensive data and applying rigorous selection criteria to identify the final cohort. Each of these fifty social entrepreneurs seeks to harness the tectonic shifts under way in the global media landscape to more constructively serve societal interests. Among the group, we found stunning diversity. For example, Core Media Fellows hailed from twenty-two countries. But we also discerned broad similarities. Indeed, each of the fifty Fellows pursued one of five overarching goals: Improving the infrastructure and environment within which the media operates; Improving standards of reporting to strengthen the quality of journalism; Ensuring the media is a vehicle for civic engagement; Making the media a self-sustaining business; Increasing media literacy by providing the public with diverse and representative content. Our study of social entrepreneurs reveals important lessons—spanning strategies to represent marginalized voices to partnership models within and beyond the media industry—for how to transform the media. But it also uncovers areas of need, such as business model innovations, where too few social entrepreneurs have found the support to pilot approaches that ultimately could reverse the media’s declining fortunes." (Pages 1-2)
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"The objective of the Study Module is to enhance the business knowledge of undergraduate and graduate students of arts, humanities and media and communications, i.e. individuals, who have potential to be (self) employed after their graduation in the field of creative industries. Special focus in the
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study module is given to the latent entrepreneurial propensities, i.e. personal qualities and skills of the individual that would enable students to pursue an entrepreneurial career when given the opportunity or incentive to new venture creation." (Page 4)
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"Central to the work represented in this issue is what we have called the emergence of new media entrepreneurs in sub-Saharan Africa. These actors generate a multitude of new (and often not easily definable) genres of information as well as entertainment and distraction, but also persuasion and heal
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ing (Böhme 2013). They are often categorized as cultural brokers (cf. Thalen 2011), mediating between dispersed audiences and spaces of communication, and taking advantage of their privileged access to new media technologies and/or advanced positions in the media field. Thus, we propose to refer back to quite classical notions of intermediaries, stemming especially from the realm of political and economic anthropology, such as brokers or middlemen (cf. Boissevain 1974, 148; Lewis and Mosse 2006), interpreting these figures mainly as entrepreneurs who control second order resources such as information, social relations, or channels of communication. In our articles we exemplify the relevance of such a conceptualization for contemporary African media fields, also beyond more functionalist aspects as we discuss their often ambiguous positions as well, caught as they are between contradicting loyalties to clients and colleagues or authorities, and also between professional standards and aspirations on the one hand and the need for income on the other. This category of media entrepreneurs, benefitting fromthese newopportunities and opening new social spaces and realms of creativity, may include journalists, radio producers (cf. Gunner et al. 2011), media technicians, or artists working within private as well as public structures, as well as those who are establishing institutions that offer media-related training, counselling, and marketing. Other media entrepreneurs are, for example, individuals who, thanks to their mass-mediated appearances and particular preaching style, draw large groups of supporters in their role as religious or political actors (Meyer 2003, cf. also the contribution by Sounaye). Examples of such media entrepreneurship also include the rising number of independent media production outlets, studios, or PR agencies doing public or private contract work, and who often profit from the new opportunities raised by national and transnational ventures in commerce and finance which require advertising and publicity. As already indicated, among those who are benefitting most from these new opportunities are many young people, often graduates, who have not always received formal training to prepare them for a job in media production, but who make their way through the various steps of internship, freelance, and contractualwork, often combining severalmedia activities in the press, in radio andTV, or asPRofficers. Some have even been successful at establishing themselves as leading media figures or local celebrities in this field." (Page 49)
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