By Bettina Ruigies

Media outlets should have an idea who's watching them (Photo by 'espensorvik' / flickr)

Today’s fast moving media environment requires a lot of flexibility from media workers. Multimedia skills are a must. Journalists need to be able to produce stories for radio or television, print or online. At the same time, digitization, the Internet and affordable equipment enables anyone who wishes to open a TV station on YouTube or at least run a blog site.

All this technical innovation offers tempting perspectives for hard working and talented journalists. But frustration and failure might set in when it turns out that hardly anybody is watching or reading.

At this year’s Deutsche Welle Global Media Forum, which took place from June 20-22 in Bonn, Germany, sustainable development expert Mohan Munasinghe recommended that the media help spread the word to the world’s elite that it’s in their own interest to limit consumption and allow the poor to grow out of their poverty. In terms of resources, the “more the rich consume, the less there is for the poor,” he said. Otherwise the entire global system is at risk of collapse with unforeseen consequences for everyone.

As vice chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Mohan Munasinghe shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore in 2007. Currently he is chairman of the Munasinghe Institute for Development (MIND) in Colombo, a professor of sustainable development at the University of Manchester in the U.K., a distinguished guest professor at Peking University and honorary senior adviser to the government of Sri Lanka. He is widely recognized as having introduced a framework called sustainomics to make development more sustainable.