CIME president Kayeromi Gomez posing in front of the recently opened CIME office in Chicago

Welcome to the second edition of our monthly newsletter. As we get closer and closer to our first ever CIME Forum 2009 to be held in Benin in West Africa, we want to invite all actors of the media industry as well as related industries to join their hands to the cause of improving higher ethical journalism in the world.

Media affect everybody, everyone, every organisation, every company, every industry, every country and the world at large. Ethics also varies with culture and time and is relative to the norms and values of inhabitants of a country. Therefore, we cannot afford to let a few people define an ethical world to be observed by journalists all over the world. That is one of the rationales behind CIME – getting all journalists involved, everywhere. That is the reason why we are all committed to doing what we are doing.

After our first newsletter was released last month to commemorate our first anniversary, I received calls from many of you who understand the vision of CIME. Many journalists around the world expressed their interest in the publication and encourage us here at CIME to do even better. And I take those calls seriously and appreciate your attentive ears and eyes.

In the next months and years, CIME will move into a new dimension and I encourage you to keep checking our website for updates and news. I also want all of my colleagues in Africa and in the rest of the world to know that we can change ethics in the media as we walk together to make CIME the first and only international framework designed to feed that need.

Finally I want to use this medium to congratulate our director Melisande Middleton for joining the prestigious Oxford University in the UK as a Visiting Scholar at the Programme in Comparative Media Law and Policy (PCMLP). Congratulations Melisande and we look forward to your involvements as you move forward toward a better understanding of legislation and ethics in journalism.

Thank you.