Making Healthy Media: A Guide for HIV Practitioners, Researchers and Project Communicators

This manual has been designed by the HIV & AIDS Media Project, a partnership between the Wits Journalism Programme and the Anova Health Institute, and can be used either as the guiding component in a two-day training, or read as a stand-alone guideline for understanding, communicating with, and writing for the South African media on issues related to HIV/AIDS. Making Healthy Media is meant for HIV practitioners, researchers and project communicators to familiarise them with South African news media, as well as equip them with the skills needed to communicate and network more effectively with the press.

According to the HIV & AIDS Media Project, this course is built on a few basic assumptions - primarily that through achieving a better understanding of how the news media works, experts in HIV can become more effective communicators and can learn to support and network with journalists in a way that will lead to an overall improvement in the quality of health (and particularly HIV) journalism in South Africa. The producers also recognise that journalists are pressed for time and that particularly health journalism is severely under-resourced in South Africa. By making experts more accessible and promoting public debate around HIV-related issues, they hope to improve the quality and quantity of HIV reporting.

The manual consist of three modules:

• Module 1: Understanding the media
• Module 2: Communicating with and through the media
• Module 3: Making your own media