Sam Swan, a UT broadcasting professor, recently returned from his second

trip to Africa this year, where he held workshops to train radio and sales

managers in the art of commercial media.

Swan visited Angola and Tanzania, helping broadcasters in developing

countries learn broadcast sales, management and advertising.

“The workshops have helped me in my teaching and research by allowing me to

go first-hand to these countries and bring this experience back to the

classroom.” Swan said

“Our college faculty is very interested in international media,” said

Barbara Moore, head of the Department of Broadcasting. “We have had

professors go to many other countries to study broadcasting and media

issues. This is very important on the college level because we feel that

students should broaden their job perspectives to look outside of East

Tennessee and focus on a global market.”

Professors like Swan deal with the issues in other cultures and are able to

bring this hands-on experience back to the University.

“Students learn a great deal about global media and this is so important to

us because more and more companies are becoming multi-national and need

employees with an understanding of the media business around the world,”

Moore said.

The workshops were offered by the International Media Training Center, a

unit of the Voice of America and a part of the United States Information

Agency. The Washington-based center is a group dedicated to helping

developing countries and growing democracies learn media-related skills and

has helped train more than 5,000 media personnel in over 130

countries.

Swan was one of the broadcast specialists chosen by the center to help

train and educate the growing commercial media stations in various

countries, especially those formerly under government controls.

Swan’s first experience with the center was in the fall of 1996 when he

trained top broadcasters from various African countries at workshops held

in Washington. Swan was so well-received by his students that he was asked

to travel to Africa to educate media personnel in their homelands.

In the last week of March 1997, he traveled to Angola where he taught 30

broadcasters with the help of a Portuguese-speaking translator. Then, in

late May, he returned to Africa, this time to Tanzania, where he trained 20

participants.

“The goals of the workshops were to provide African radio managers with the

training they need to convert government controlled radio stations to

privately-owned and self-sufficient stations,” Swan said.

Swan said that stations existing in Africa today have fundamentally

different formats than stations in the United States. Many of these

stations are interested in mass appeal rather than segmented audience

appeal like U.S. stations, though there are a few with an “American” style.

African stations have more emphasis on talk radio and news than most U.S.

stations and they play a wide variety of music styles per station to

interest many different people.

Swan said that he plans to continue in this work and to follow up with the

trainees to see how they’ve implemented their new skills.

“There has been an ongoing interest in these international programs and I

plan to continue in this exciting work and follow up with my students

through e-mail messages and return trips to see the stations running

first-hand,” Swan said.