THERE is new thinking on how the Tanzania Journalism Excellence Awards (EJAT) ought to be organised, with the Media Council of Tanzania (MCT) having lately postponed the accepting of entries for 2024 while it starts work on a new format for the competition.

While it is basically the competition among journalists that is being reviewed to identify more practitioners, including those not submitting any work for consideration, society is also being mirrored: As these competitions date back to 2009, are we still in the same environment of old?

The MCT executive secretary told journalists in Dar es Salaam that the council will conduct a review, even research, to see how qualified personnel actually seek out impactful stories, moving away from individual presentation of published news or some other journalistic items.

MCT used to open the window for receiving entrances filed by the respective journalists during the final months of each year with intent to cover the outgoing year.

But are there better methods of selecting award winners other than by allowing journalists to make presentations? When a journalist opts not to compete by filing a story, what are the chances that such item will be particularly competitive?

Assuming that one seeks to diminish favouritism or oversight in excellence awards, the preliminary difficulty is how far the total scope of what comes into the media will be examined by a selected panel.

At the moment the panel examines entries, and then offers points or marks depending on the level of professionalism the work demonstrates.

When it is asked to start from scratch without any preliminary entries, chances that it won’t go far enough. It won’t have a ready audience awaiting results, no entrants in the first place or even no registered competitors.

Another line of inquiry into this change in procedure is to demand if there are likely to be massive differences between entries from individuals and independently seeking out such candidates by a team of researchers.

If the difference is massive, it follows that there is a range of stories that are being ignored or are not being presented for consideration.

There would be an auxiliary question in that regard, as to what range of stories can be written, published and peered over for consideration in an excellence award competition.

For nearly a decade now, one could safely say that journalism has lost some of sparkle witnessed or experienced in the years starting with media sector liberalisation in the late 1980s and on to the 2015 General Election.

From then on, there has been such a stretch of controls on news output that themes have kept changing in ways that are disorienting for those attached to actual media excellence.

We now have statutes against investigative stories that are different from legislation on traditional libel, which makes the idea of panel selection all the more worrisome as to its possible direction in the face of pressures for non-eventful, exciting stories.