Confab to transform News Agencies underway in Rabat

From Alice Tettey, Rabat, Morocco

Rabat (Morocco), March 26, GNA - A two-day seminar to help develop the knowledge and skills of community managers of news agencies to help modernise their operations opened in Rabat, the capital of Morocco on Monday with a call on News Agencies to take advantage of the use of social media to grow their news organisations.

It is being organized by the Alliance of Mediterranean News Agencies (AMAN) with the Moroccan News Agency as facilitators and is on the theme, “The Role and Function of the Community Manager in a Modern News Agency”.

Representatives of news agencies from Ghana, Tunisia, Egypt, Albania, Morocco, Nigeria, Liberia, Cote D’Ivoire, Algeria and Spain are attending.

Topics being treated include, “building a community, ‘managing, growing and scaling your community,’ ‘increasing its sense of identity’ and ‘keys to efficient reporting and performance monitoring.”

Soufiane Moudden, the Digital Marketing and Business Development Director of the US Department of State Alumni, urged news agencies to build and brand social media platforms constructively to significantly attract and retain their audience and win more readers.

To him, failure by News Agencies to develope digital strategies to deliver their messages on social media will eventually render them irrelevant and out of business.

The brands on social media, he advised, should be humorous, user friendly and valuable to their audience, adding “the community manager should believe in digital platforms to get the best performance out of them”.

Mr Moudden ,who is also the co-founder and chief executive at BEMAV, a marketing and advertising agency,  indicated that the digital platform for the community manager, should be a tool as well as a lifestyle to enable them maximise its use for the benefit of his organization as well as the audience.

The managers should be innovative and discover new ways to make it use exciting as they connected with people and gain their trust for mutual benefit.

If the news was authentic, credible and truthful and does not connect with the people or its readers, it will be very difficult to sell, he cautioned, and consequently urged all news agencies to strategise and manage social media well to stay in business.

Earlier in his opening remarks, Mr Rachid Mamoons, News Director of Morocco News Agency (MAP), said the seminar was put together to assist news agencies to transform their ways of operations because of the changing media landscape.

GNA

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