21 Years of Media Development: Lessons, Challenges and Change

Leaving Thomson after 21 years, former Managing Director David Quin reflects on a career spent navigating the shifting sands of global media development. From rebuilding trust in post-conflict societies to tackling the challenges of disinformation and collapsing media economies, David’s journey has been defined by the complexities of fostering sustainable, ethical journalism worldwide. In this article, he shares personal insights, hard-earned lessons, and his vision for the future of media development, offering a view of what it means to support free and independent media in an ever-changing landscape.

She wasn’t impressed. At all. Her scowl somehow managed to pierce through the deep fog of cigarette smoke from right across the newsroom. We weren’t welcome, that much was clear.

Twenty-one years ago, my new Thomson colleague and I were asked to help reshape the news output of a national broadcaster, aiming to turn what had been a hate filled mouthpiece into a balanced, multilingual, multi-media content provider for a shiny post conflict age. No easy task.

The unimpressed reporter soon made her position clear. Pointing sourly, she asked us to sit and watch a monitor. On it her greatest hits. The first of which showed her in a trench during a recently concluded conflict, oversized hard hat on, flack jacketed and proudly doing a piece to camera. It concluded with the most unique sign off I have ever seen. She picked up a Rocket Propelled Grenade and fired it towards her ‘enemy’. Thomson, week one.

What is media development? Who decides what it is and who gets to deliver it? Why are we doing what we do and where we do it? My journey with Thomson has taken me right to the heart of these questions, and many, many more. Across 60 countries and sitting inside policy conversations from Brussels to Washington DC, Berlin to London, the simple truth is that media development isn’t a fixed discipline and it can’t be. But thinking about the bigger picture of exactly what it is and what it means for journalists and audiences day to day, is part of Thomson’s DNA. It’s where every project starts.

Twenty years ago, many programmes were deeply tied to the horrendous legacies of the Rwandan genocide and the collapse of Yugoslavia. The mission was to rebuild conversations, foster reconciliation, turn state broadcasters into national broadcasters, get trust back. Never again Rwanda’s Radio Interahamwe, never again Milosevic’s RTS. It was part of ‘nation building’, part of the interventionist zeitgeist. It wasn’t easy and it wasn’t quick and it needed time. It often didn’t get it. And then 9/11 happened.

From there many programmes took on a different tone. For much of the noughties ‘stability and deradicalisation’ became the watchwords. What could media do to create the conditions for stability in Afghanistan? To delegitimise the Taliban? To halt the slide towards the sectarian nightmare of Iraq? Something. Not enough. Never on its own. What could the media do to support stable democratic transitions and transparency in the former Soviet Union? Shine lights, yes. Forge public support, yes. Challenge elites, yes, up to a point. But on its own, fight back, year on year, against western enabled kleptocracies? Few could manage that. Those that did often paid a very heavy price.

The last decade has seen a profound shift in thinking about what media development really is. As our own media economies have collapsed in the West, with social media devasting local and national news business models, the question now is, ‘what do you know?’ And with mounting disinformation threats undermining our own democracies, fuelling nativist populism, threatening social cohesion, can media development organisations from the global North have much to say anymore? Best practice…what best practice?

If my time at Thomson tells me anything, it is that media development isn’t a one-way conversation anymore. And it never should have been. Thomson took an early and swift lead on media sustainability and e-learning issues over a decade ago. Why? Because it saw the need to get the best skills on how ethical media can turn a profit, from wherever they were to be found to wherever they were needed most. From Leeds to Lusaka, Kelvingrove to Kyiv, Berlin to Bogota, Thomson acts as a skills bridge worldwide. Share mistakes, act as early warning radars, share wins. And through its blended, e-learning approach, Thomson builds networks of journalists worldwide that can, and do, help each other through the toughest of times. It’s not a panacea, but for many it’s the shared values and support that gets them through.

Thomson has been my professional home for a long time, and I know many of the journalists and communicators worldwide it has worked with in its 62-year history feel it’s their home too, whatever they have gone on to do. It is and long will be.

But like any home, it’s good to change the furniture from time to time and refresh. Thomson will continue to thrive, listening to the people it serves and supports across the world. It will do so emboldened by a long and proud tradition of fostering media resilience, putting strong defences in place to resist the headwinds.

In the word of the Thomson family motto; 'never a backward step'.