Alpha Media hosts digital media workshop, to launch new daily newspaper

Today, Alpha Media Holdings hosted a digital media workshop where they invited marketing professionals, advertising agency and fellow publishers to learn and discuss issues around publishing and advertising online. The main speaker at the event was Dave Duarte, who spoke mainly on the opportunity of new media and why ad agencies and advertisers need to shift from the current habit of only including digital platforms being an afterthought. You can find most of what he covered on the #AMHDigitalFirst hashtag livetweets.

Alpha Media also unveiled at the workshop a new strategy they are calling the “Digital First” (hence the hashtag) strategy. A key part of this new strategy AMH chief technology officer Kangai Maukazuva said, is to have multiple digital publishing platforms; mobile new services, social media, multimedia and the existing websites. Maukazuva also revealed the company will be getting into the online classifieds market with a new product to be launched soon.

The workshop was intended to help unlock the value (revenues) of online platforms as a channel of publishing for the media companies. To do this, the media companies need to have the advertising agencies and their clients (the advertisers) to understand how these new digital platforms work, and how they can be used for advertising purposes and engagement with consumers.

AMH also took the opportunity of the workshop to announce a new daily newspaper titled Southern Eye which the company will launch on the 3^rd of June. As the name suggests, the title is targeted at readers in the southern parts of the country, that is Midlands, Masvingo, Matebeleland. Announcing the new title, AMH commercial director, Rita Chinyoka, said the paper will compete with the state owned Chronicle.

The Southern eye will join other AMH titles, NewsDay, Standard and Independent.