Declining membership, consecutive losses

Samisoni Pareti





Threatening dark clouds loom over the future of the region’s main media body, the Pacific Islands News Asociation (PINA).
Dwindling membership and rising costs have seen PINA posting consecutive losses for the last two financial years.
For 2007, Ernst & Young auditors put financial losses of PINA at F$3100. By 2008, however, PINA’s loss had worsened to F$30,633, an increase of $27,533 when compared to the previous year.
Auditors highlighted four major cost items; salaries, superannuation payments, provision for depreciation after an office refurbishment and travel and accommodation.
The 107% jump in salaries was not so much due to staff promotions but more about staff recruitment.
Salaries in 2008 totalled F$83,904 compared to $44,872 the previous year.
A greater slice of 2008's expenditures too was in staff travel and accommodation, reaching F$28,671 from $11,899 in 2007.
Two consecutive losses meant that PINA has been eating away into its accumulated funds to survive.
At the beginning of 2007, cash reserves of the regional news body totalled F$72,516.
This dropped to $69,416 at the end of 2007 and again shrunk to $38,783 by the beginning of this year.
Two consultants who looked into the financial future of the media body in early 2009 now warns that unless PINA finds other sources of revenue, its current rate of operation is unsustainable.
In their report tabled at PINA’s annual general meeting in Vanuatu in late July, the two– Ulafala Aiavao and Moses Saitala–observed that while subscriptions to PINA’s news service PACNEWS increased by 5% during 2007 and 2008, PINA's membership fees declined by 42%.
“The decline in the payment of PINA's  membership fee is a worrying trend,” noted Aiavao and Saitala in their report titled ‘Pacific Islands News Association (PINA) – A Sustainable Pathway into the Future.’
“Those PINA members who have not paid their annual membership fees have their own reasons for not doing so.
“It is quite clear nonetheless that given the nature of PINA, many would not pay their annual subscription if they no longer see the benefit of doing so.”
Non-payment of membership fees is reflected in the figures released by the two consultants in their report.
By early 2009, some 28 newspaper and magazine companies were members of the regional news organisation.
When the deadline in the payment of fees expired at the end of March 2009, only eight companies had paid up.
Defaulters included key players like the two News Limited-owned newspapers in the islands; Post Courier in Papua New Guinea and the Fiji Times.
Publications in Samoa, Tonga, Tahiti (French Polynesia) and in the northern Pacific have all not paid on time, as well as the University of the South Pacific’s journalist students’ newspaper, Wansolwara.
At least one member, the Vanuatu Trading Post, made the decision in August this year to withdraw its membership from PINA due to differences with key officials in their own media organisation, the Media Association of Vanuatu (MAV).
President of MAV, Moses Steven is now President of PINA.
The seeming disinterest of print members of PINA is ironic given that they were the original founders of the association.
Broadcasters used to have their own Pacific Islands Broadcasting Association (PIBA) and it was not until November 2004 when PIBA was dissolved and merged into PINA.
It is also worth noting that since the merge, broadcast members had been active in the regional body.
Since 2005, for instance, radio or television members of PINA had been elected as PINA presidents.
PACNEWS is also a PIBA initiative which is now funding bulk of the PINA Secretariat’s day-to-day costs.
For the future, the two consultants observed that a 107% increase in personnel emolument between 2007 and 2008 in the face of a 5% decline in PINA’s core revenue waMs “likely to be unsustainable.”
The challenge this poses to the secretariat, they said, is ‘serious but not insurmountable’.
As a way to grow its revenue base, the consultants are suggesting that PINA develops and implements donor-funded capacity building projects that address the needs of its members.
It should also consider tapping into European Union funding for civil society organisations, and that the PINA Secretariat employs stringent cost-monitoring accounting practices.
“The level of expenditure would normally be determined against future revenues the organisation is expected to raise in the next financial year,” said the Aaivao and Saitala report.
“Where adjustment is needed to be made to the organisation’s financial position, it is normally the organisation’s expenditure that has to be adjusted to provide for a sound financial position.”
Among their recommendations is the introduction of multi-year budgeting for the PINA Secretariat and exploring more user-pay services to help grow its revenue earning streams.
PINA, they said, should also revisit its membership criteria to help build a more sustainable and viable platform into the future, and that the flow of information between the secretariat, the PINA board and its members should be ‘actively improved'.
The consultants are also recommending major changes in the way PACNEWS operates, in that the news service should “decentralise some of its operations” by making it a “virtual network”.
“Initially, it could start with a member taking on a temporary role as a guest sub-editor or reporter for one or more days a month by rotation.
“The actual mechanics will be coordinated by the Suva-based chief editor and PINA in consultation with the members.
“The network will use the internet to remove the need for travel and associated costs.”
The new Steven-led board of PINA will now look into the recommendations contained in the Aiavao and Saitala report.
A former news editor of the Vanuatu Broadcasting and Television Corporation, Steven also has a print background when he started his own newspaper in Port Vila a couple of years ago. He is also a former executive of the Vanuatu Football Association.
He succeeded the CEO of the National Broadcasting Corporation of PNG, Joseph Ealedona, as PINA president. Ealedona didn’t seek re-election at the Vanuatu meeting.
Steven beat Fiji’s Mai TV and Mai Life magazine editor Stanley Simpson by 10 votes to 8.
In addition to the changes recommended for the secretariat and PACNEWS, Steven and his board will also consider a motion seeking the expulsion of  Fiji's Ministry of Information from PINA.
The motion was proposed at a session on media freedom at the main PINA Pacific media summit in Port Vila late July, in which delegates felt that a member that could not support a core function of the association—that of upholding media freedom—should be deemed to have lost its right to membership.
PINA members, however, endorsed its secretariat’s position that it should remain in Suva in spite of the strict censorship all media outlets in Fiji have to work in.
“This is PINA’s real testing ground, thus the need for the secretariat to continue its efforts to engage with the interim government on behalf of our members in Fiji,” argued Pacnews editor Makereta Komai in her report to the PINA AGM.
A move to incorporate the online network of journalists and former journalists known as the Pacific Freedom Forum to be the media freedom watchdog arm of PINA was not discussed at the annual meeting.
Steven moved that the matter be considered by his board.
Writing on this subject, PINA Secretariat manager Matai Akauola suggested that PINA should not out-source this responsibility.
“We are so quick to call leaders seditious in certain quarters but at the very same time we are becoming like the very same people we accuse or label,” wrote Akauola in his biennial report to the AGM. PINA may have dropped the baton in some instances, but it doesn’t mean we give it up and quit.
“PINA, a body recognised by the nations and governments of the Pacific and beyond, will step up to the mark for its members.
“We will not allow this work to be done by someone else,” Akauola said.