Having studied and worked in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa for close to 7 years, it undoubtedly holds a very special place in my heart. I truly believe that it one of the most beautiful and diverse regions in Southern Africa and it’s surprisingly underrated as a tourist destination, even amongst many South [...]

DStv Mobile has sponsored a project, which is currently under way, that equips journalism students from Wits University and CityVarsity with Nokia N95 “mojo” kits similar to the one pictured below: The main aim of the project is for journalism students to produce video, audio, and photos that get uploaded to a special mobile broadcasting [...]

I recently found this interesting presentation by Alisa Miller, CEO of Public Radio International, speaking at TED about the global news crisis. Alisa starts off by asking the question “how does news shape the way we see the world?”. A serious and particularly relevant issue in the 21st Century which is exemplified by the news [...]

There’s a very interesting discussion taking place on Poynter Online over a column written by Roy Peter Clark, a journalist and writing coach, who believes that the only way to secure the future of journalism is to buy and read printed newspapers. What’s more, he says, it is the responsibility of every journalist to do [...]

OJR has created a Wiki of *mostly* free tools and web services that journalists can take advantage of to improve their storytelling and multimedia skills. The Wiki is divided into several subsections including multimedia, blogs/CMS, picture & video services, forums, RSS, newsletters and HTML/CSS references. Although I’d say that in its current state the Wiki [...]

Vincent and I had a bit of a laugh today when I opened up the International version of OhMyNews and clicked through to the Citizen Reporter Resources feature. To our amazement the NML is featured in the article, although we didn’t know anything about it and weren’t contacted by the author. What follows is even [...]

Michael Kinsley has written a very interesting opinion piece entitled Do Newspapers Have a Future? which is a very frank and authoritative smack-down from someone that comes from an ‘old media’ background. Not to completely spoil the read I’ll just quote the last paragraph: Newspapers on paper are on the way out. Whether newspaper companies [...]

Last night was a cause for celebration at the 10th annual SABC/Highway Africa Innovative Use of New Media Awards (broadcast live on satellite) where two of our 4th-year new media students, Gregor Rohrig and Carly Ritz won an award in the Non-Profit category for their excellent local journalism portal Jo’s Toolkit. I have spoken about [...]

Two 4th year new media students (Gregor Rohrig and Carly Ritz) recently set up a fantastic new South African journalism resource called Jo’s Toolkit (play on Journalist’s Toolkit). As Gregor explains: Jo’s Toolkit is a journalism resource. We have especially targeted the student and grassroot media as potential users for this site. It allows anyone [...]

Earlier today the multimedia feature stories that our students produced for the Sunday Times online went live. The theme for this project, which we dubbed hola2010, was based on the upcoming Fifa World Cup which is scheduled to take place in South Africa in 2010. I think the students have done a phenomenal job and [...]