Must post event reportage favour organisers?

Is post event reportage important to event organisers these days? If they do matter, must it favour them at all? Shouldn’t people be allowed to report on an event they witnessed without being coaxed?

Lots of events or shows require serious consideration and as such, enough time invested into their planning to ensure their success.

For events such as Miss Ghana, Miss Malaika, Ghana Music Awards, 4Syte TV Music Videos Awards, Ghana Meets Naija, RTP Awards, Ghana Movie Awards, Music of Ghanaian Origin (MOGO), Night With The Stars and such other big events, a great deal of time is spent on planning.

It is not an easy task to put together a team to plan and work round the clock for major events like those mentioned above. Depending on the degree of importance of the event, it may take months or sometimes years of planning and preparation for a show to be put together. But it all does not end when the show comes off.

After working tirelessly to pull their shows through, majority of organisers, seem not to care about or show interest in events that happen afterwards.

Among occurrences after shows include post event reportage. This is an important function that is not given much attention or at times largely ignored.

The job of critiquing personalities and events people on television and radio dissect and discuss various entertainment issues that had come up in the week.

Others too write stories and feature articles in the newspapers and others write blogs about events on the internet.

If it is your job to talk or write about people to make income, be prepared to take insults or criticisms from the followers of the people you talk or write about or from the people you critique.

The reviewer must develop a thick skin to be able to do what some of us are doing. If you criticise people, you should be ready to be lambasted as well.

In the field of criticising showbiz personalities you may make enemies as a matter of course. Much of the time, when a person who gets criticised fails to take into account the thing that were talked about, they regard the critic as ‘someone who is trying to pull them down’.

The critic automatically becomes a person to hate. I have been stereotyped as one. Uncle Nab, the Editor of Graphic Showbiz told me few months back, “Ebenezer, don’t worry, these things come with the job”. Surely it does!

Steadily, this phenomenon is creeping into the entertainment industry in Ghana. However, it is said that those who take interest and delight in discussing or speaking out so that certain things we do wrong are corrected, are the people who truly have us at heart.

It is in our best interest that our parents or superiors reprimand us when we go wrong. Such rebukes are meant to correct us and not necessarily to kill our spirit.

This new phenomenon that is slowly getting into the showbiz industry by which critics and reviewers are seen in a bad light is not doing the industry any good.

On the other hand, write-ups and articles that are done to review or criticise shows must be embraced and accepted because they serve in many ways to bring about improvement.

A show can be said to be successful but success is relative. That is why a post event reportage becomes imperative to the event organiser. A show can be successful in the eyes of the organiser but the views of others ought to be sought for any flaws or lapses that were not detected.

Hence a post event report or a critique of an event should not be seen as an attempt to run the organiser down or perhaps arouse hostility of their chance at attracting sponsorship for subsequent events.

Events organisers can benefit from a report that brings their flaws and shortcomings to fore. After all, the onus lies with them to bring correction to situations where they went wrong and work on improving on such areas in future.

When a report is negative it only goes to show that certain things were not done right for which the organiser must take notice.

Reports criticising events can be blunt and critical but it is only to show that organisers needs to do a lot more work to perfect their act.

Instead of fighting, insulting or blacklisting people who point out shortcomings, any anger that there is must be channeled into doing the right things suggested by the report.

Last week I placed a call to a colleague who was acting as a media liaison to an event organiser to talk about an upcoming show which the company was preparing to put up. I was told bluntly that I had been ‘blacklisted’ by the company.

Yes, I had been blacklisted and my crime was that I had criticised an earlier event they organised in this same column. What it meant is that, I will be denied certain privileges, access or recognition to any of their shows, for now and in the future.

In fact, several media personnel have also been blacklisted because they criticised one event or another. Perhaps, is it about time people sat down and appreciated those who are bold to tell them of their flaws rather than to listen to sycophants who will tell them otherwise in order to receive favours from them.

Severally colleagues have been blacklisted because a show was bad and they reported just that. This doesn’t augur well for an industry which is growing.

How can the industry grow to its full potential when event organisers expect to be shielded and lauded even when they go wrong? Is that how to grow an industry?