My first Citizen Journalism class at local Grahamstown community newspaper Grocott’s Mail (GM) is history. Eleven participants this morning learned what a citizen journalist is, what news is and how they can generate their own story ideas.

It’s exciting to be part of the project named Iindaba Ziyafika (The news is coming). “The project focuses on developing innovative ways of using new media technologies to facilitiate community journalism, and is funded by a grant from the US-based John S. and James L. Knight Foundation“, explains the GM website concisely.

Part of the training were a number of practical exercises and a slideshow.

Course outline

Week 1: What is Grocott’s Mail about? What is a citizen reporter?
Week 2: A nose for news: what is newsworthy? Basics of good journalism.
Week 3: Writing a publishable news story: the lead and story structures.
Week 4: Interviews, observation, sources, facts and ethics.
Week 5: Photography: how to take better photos with your cellphone. Introduction to basic photo editing.
Week 6: Producing citizen journalism.

GM is excited about the potential that the Grocott’s Mail Citizen Journalism Newsroom holds for encouraging and empowering all citizens of Grahamstown to more actively engage in debates and discussions about important issues in their lives through producing and publishing their own original content. In short, the Grocott’s Mail Citizen Journalism Newsroom is intended to foster a keener sense of community awareness, involvement and, ultimately, pride.

Links

For more information please visit the GM website, the Citizen Journalism Newsroom info page and the productions of the previous course.

By Zimkhitha Mbunge

Applications for the third Grocott’s Mail Citizen Journalism course close at 5pm on Monday 15 February – go to www.grocotts.co.za/cj to register now.
The course, which is free of charge, takes place in the Grocott’s Mail Citizen Journalism newsroom, and will run for six weeks, from Monday 22 February to Thursday 1 April 2010, from 9am to 11am.

Four groups of 10 participants each will complete the course – one group for each day of the week.

Participants need to have basic computer skills to take part in the course, which will cover a variety of topics geared at turning ordinary citizens into citizen journalists.

Participants will be taught the basics of good journalism, how to write a publishable news story, how to set up and conduct interviews, and how to take good photos with your cellphone.

Course trainer Elvira van Noort says, “I expect this course to be another success story. Participants will leave with a fine set of skills and knowledge that they can apply to assist their community from a grassroots level.
Issues they can focus on range from health, education and crime to service delivery. The plan is to stir the pot a bit.”

Three or four outstanding course participants will also have the opportunity of sitting in on Grocott’s Mail diary meetings after the course is finished.
These star reporters will get the chance to keep on writing for the newspaper and will receive remuneration for their efforts.

Participants in the previous two courses had a variety of stories published, which can all be read in the MyStory section on the Grocott’s Mail website (www.grocotts.co.za).

A themed campaign dealing with the issue of waste management in Grahamstown   Ukucoca eMakana (Makana Clean-up) – saw many wellthought out stories accompanied by photographs being produced and published by course participants towards the end of last year.

If you’re the type of person who takes interest in what’s happening around you and you love telling stories, this course is for you. You can use the skills you’ll learn to tell Grahamstown about the interesting people and happenings in your community or in your organisation.

For more information and to register for the course,visit www.grocotts.co.za/cj or come in to Grocott’s Mail (40 High Street) to fill in a form.

For me it is time to get ready for what is now publicly known as a circus. This one does not involve tigers, elephants or horses but just a whole lot of clowns, acrobats and jugglers. Its our own media circus in the African Media Matrix building at Rhodes University.

CueBlog
Cue Media is an amalgamation of media platforms that report on Festival. It is the ultimate real-life learning experience for newspaper, TV, radio, photography and online students.

Its now my third year of involvement and I have to admit that these ten days are marked in my calendar with rainbow colours and some festive, albeit childish, balloons and flowers. I’ll be editing CueBlog, the latest edition to Cue Media.

The idea of CueBlog originated in 2007 and comes from Prof Peter Verwey who lectures at the Dutch School of Journalism in Utrecht. It started as a convergence project, to see if it was possible to merge the separate existing newsrooms to make them more efficient. Why not re- and pre-purpose material? Why not use photographs from CuePix as a slideshow with added sound from CueRadio? Well, CueOnline is set in its own ways so we conjured up a whole new platform to show that we are able to converge all the different media and still do our own additional reporting.

Convergence Challenges
And so CueBlog was born in 2007 and with the help of Dutch students and a group of Highway Africa News Agency reporters we were off to a quick start. We didn’t foresee some of the challenges. The daily converged diary meetings did not work as well as we hoped and there was a lack of understanding from the other platforms. Why do we need a blog, don’t we have online already? Are they just going to use our content and that’s it? Do they really need a space in the newspaper to show off their most read posts?

Moving Forward
In 2008 the relations changed dramatically. It was the same-old challenges for the first two or three days but after some well-thought over chitchat with the other editors we finally felt as though we were becoming part of Cue Media. First of all, we got our column in the newspaper, secondly we also received National Arts Festival goodies, thirdly we managed to get some of our stories linked to stories from the newspaper and vice versa, we also sold three advertisements (a clear indication that we are taking this blogging seriously and we are also able to add to the pot).

For this year’s edition of CueBlog we have decided to start on the right foot. We are not in competition with CueOnline and will therefore this year collaborate more closely then ever before. One Dutch student from the blog will team up with one online student on a daily basis and make a multimedia production for both platforms. This exchange of skills and knowledge should be an important underlying characteristic of the whole project, just as testing the boundaries of convergence is.

It’s back!
This year the much-loathed daily converged diary meetings return. But for now we’ll just call it the “editors teatime” as to not enforce that scary word ‘convergence’ into anyone’s mind. It does not make sense to run separate newsrooms that are under the same heading without knowing what everyone is doing. Off course a CMS would sort this out but with no funding for that we will continue working with the good-old folder based system.

We have also purchased Cue Media shirts, just to visually become a part of the circus.

I’ll be posting updates on the NaFest CueBlog project on this site as we go. In the meantime, if you have any enquiries or comments about CueBlog you can get in touch with me.

Cheers,
Elvira

The newspapers I had a closer look at in Suriname are: De Ware Tijd, The Times of Suriname and Dagblad Suriname, in Guyana I bought Stabroek News and Kaieteur News.

Unfortunately the journalistic skills seem to still be very basic, there is a lack of investigative stories and stories are often unbalanced and not to the point. Besides some hints and tips I’ve compiled a list of story ideas, just some articles and topics that I thought are missing in the Guyanese papers. And yes, I am willing to travel back and write them all  

The list
-    STINASU (Suriname Nature Conservation): what are they doing about mismanagement in Bronsberg Nature Reserve and why are the people from Bronsweg village angry with the staff at the Reserve? Something smells fishy here…

-    What is being done about illegal gold and diamond mining in the interior? We spend four days in Bronsberg Nature Reserve and heard dynamite explosions and gun shots (apparently people are illegally hunting for bush meat)

-    Deeper into the interior, from say Atjoni onwards, there is a problem with safety regulations on the water. Boatmen are not supposed to be on the water after dark, it is too dangerous (especially with tourists and children), but this practice is still  happening

-    The fast flowing river is by many villages used as a waste bin. Great if you are one of the villages at the top of the river but not so nice when you are downstream. Plastic is an issue, make an investigative report about the situation as is and look at the long-term implications

-    Write about this little annoying habit of ‘bakra-tax’. This self-imposed tax means that white people have to pay a bit extra on groceries, clothing and booze. The habit is laughed at but becoming more of an issue with the increasing amounts of (white) tourists

-    Do a check-up on the health clinics in the interior: are there really runny smoothly? Do an investigation into malaria, dengue and other tropical disease

-    There is an increasing amount of Chinese people setting up shop in the interior. The villagers are happy because the Chinese food is cheaper but the Surinamese shopkeepers are struggling to make a living. There is a stunning emotional story to be written here

Educate and localise news
-    Try educate Surinamese people about animals and nature. There are many misconceptions. I can give one example, it took place in Nickerie. A local Rasta captured a young Anaconda while it was eating one of its chickens. Rasta people use the snake oil for medical treatments, so he kept it in a blue drum. As visitors we were allowed a peek into the drum. I asked a local onlooker “Is that an Anaconda?”, his answer was: “No, this is a waterboa, I have seen the movie Anaconda and those kind of snakes we don’t have here!”.  Ai

-    Surinam harbours an eclectic amount of cultural differences that need to be celebrated. Why not make a weekly portrait series (with good photographs) of the things that are normal to some and unknown to others. What I mean? Well, a portrait series of men who walk around with a little singing bird in a cage (and treat those better then their wives) or a series about old men sitting at the Waterkant discussing politics. Maybe portraits of a number of Chinese shopkeepers, people who keep monkeys as pets, tour operators, frustrated road workers, Brazilian gold diggers and street gangs

-    What about serious science stories? Rockets are being launched in neighbouring country French-Guyana, scientific research with remarkable results is done in nature reserves: write about the outcomes

-    Try to localise news. For instance, the news about the world economy and recession can easily be localised. Research the impact of the recession on Surinam or the Guyana’s on a big and small scale: the country’s economical growth and a shop owners’ turnover or people’s spending

-    In the case of Surinam, try to incorporate as many languages, peoples and cultures as possible. There are currently no newspapers who offer news in Chinese or news in Hindi. Also, there is not much (serious) news about China, India or Africa. Why not? You can also do a weekly immigrant’s profile

-    There is no explanation of political, economic and scientific terms. It is easy enough to highlight ten words used in the newspaper and to put them in a separate column (maybe on the puzzle page) with an explanation

-    Put citizens who are making a positive difference in the spotlight. A weekly profile with photo and small interview with that one person who has done something special to help the community

Involve your readers
-    Involve your readers by not just publishing their letters but also publishing short comments on previous articles and by involving them in choosing a citizen of the year, encourage them to send in photos and phone with news to a special hotline/ SMS number

-    Finally, as a journalist: get involved in your community, travel with local transport, visit the interior, keep networking and make sure you have good contacts with certain police and ministers and other key sources (and make sure they know it is you who makes the news, they can’t be writing their own articles).

All the newspapers have incredible potential but at the moment there is just not enough training and the budgets are too small. The above ideas might assist in unleashing some of the papers potential without costing to much effort and money.

Regards,
Elvira

I’m going back to my roots. Its not just that I am visiting my family in Suriname, I am also returning to my journalistic roots. After a year of running multimedia projects, giving trainings and lecturing I can’t wait to write and be a journalist again.

Areas of interest
There is enough to write about but I mainly want to concentrate on ICTs and new media and its impact on the Guyanas. Tons is happening and I can assure you it is exciting (but keeping it a secret for now!). Other areas of interest are tourism and nature. I’ll also regularly publish stories on my personal blog (www.elviravannoort.nl/southamerica09).

Need a story, journalistic article, reportage?
If you are interested in a story or want a certain story to be written you are welcome to get in touch via the ‘Contact‘ page. It is possible to write the story in both Dutch and English. I also travel with a Nikon camera so it is possible for me to take photos. Because of my extensive network in South America it is also possible for me to work on stories with a professional photographer.

Travel timeline
The ‘Where is Elvira’ widget in the sidebar tells you where I will be. The time spend in each country depends on the work. However, I return to The Netherlands on 11 May.

Evaluations
During the final lecture of each course the students fill out a self-made evaluation form. Completely new for me was teaching blogging within a School. The fourth-year students work in a crossmedia lab, using mostly radio and television, and had to now integrate Campusblog.nl in their schedule.

Some comments:

“Blogging is not scary at all, I can actually do it myself”
–
“It was very cool to hear about Web 3.o, as a person who is interested in Internet-related news I didn’t realise what impact it has”
–
“Blogging is not just for people who like to write about themselves, you can use it as a journalist. I think I’ll start setting up a blog with my work soon”

Freelance theory evaluations
Another course that was new to me is Freelance Theory. As a freelance journalist myself I had to now tell about 60 eager-to-learn third and fourth year journalism students about the mistakes I’ve made, how I survive financially and how I cope with doing my own administration. Luckily I had tons of guests and a great book to help me out. See my previous blog post for more.

Some comments:

“I now know how to get started. I really need to work on my network”
–
“I really loved listening to all the anecdotes and practical hints and tips, this was very useful”
–
“Before these lectures I didn’t know if I wanted to take the risk and start my own text writing company. I was worried about the financial side and the administration. Thank you for clearing up a lot of the questions I had”
–
“It’s really not that difficult as I thought. You just need to DO it and not just THINK about doing it. I will become a freelancer, I’m 100% sure now”
–

Buzz buzz
I did learn that all students apparently need a break between the hours during every lecture. It was normal for me to keep on going for two hours in a row but today’s climate is more relaxed then it ever was, which means coffee at the start of the class, during the break AND afterwards. Buzz buzz

Tight deadlines
Other students first complain about the tight deadlines I set, only realising later on that it helps them get through the course. Others find the assignments difficult, but challenging a student can be very rewarding. Many students now realise that being a freelance journalist doesn’t just mean having as many holidays as you want.

I hope to continue lecturing at the end of this year and I will obviously take all the comments from the evaluations with me.

How do you set up, create and sustain a professional network? How do you pitch a story, find new clients and keep in touch?

Other topics involve the Chamber of Commerce, paying tax and insurances. The students also make a number of assignments, they have to write a freelancer profile, make a business plan and visit a media cafe to network with fellow journalist.

Its necessary to teach students about being a freelancer in these financially messy times and to be able to survive on their own.

Guest speakers

We also have a number of guest speakers and so far we welcomed: Tom van der Leij, Bas Maliepaard, Sander Zurhake, Herman Spinhof and Ilvy Njiokiktjien who all shared their experiences in the freelance world.

Take a look at the slideshows of the first 2 lectures here and here. Please note that there are in Dutch.

Awesome book

Also, without the ‘Handboek Freelancen 2008-2009‘ from Tijs van den Boomen and Wilma van Hoeflaken it would have been impossible to explain tax and administrative issues. The book is now required for each Freelance student in my class.

This article was published just after I co-coordinated the Digital Citizen Indaba in Grahamstown, South Africa in September 2007.  It was a follow-up story, in 2006 I wrote about the South African blogosphere and commented about its invisibility.

Another update!

The third Digital Citizen Indaba in September 2008 was another great opportunity for African bloggers and new media workers to get together. We focused on creating and sustaining the African digital voice. Click here for the DCI 3.0 wrap up. You can find the presentations of all speakers on the same site.

Unfortunately Habtamu Dugo (Ethiopian blogger, lecturer, journalist, friend and old classmate) had to run from the oppressive regime in Ethiopia. I dearly wish him strength for the upcoming year.

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The article translated:

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The African blogosphere: it is time for an update

By Elvira van Noort

22 September 2007, Grahamstown, South Africa

It’s not easy to host and organise a blogging conference in Africa. Is there such a thing as a blogosphere in Africa and shouldn’t we concentrate on eradicating malaria or focus on protecting endangered mountain gorillas in Congo? Only during the second edition of the Digital Citizen Indaba it became clear what impact blogs have on the continent.

The Digital Citizen Indaba (DCI) took place in Grahamstown, South Africa on the 8th and 9th of September. The crème-de-la-crème of the African blogosphere, numerous Internet professionals, and media workers converged to discuss topics running from Web 2.0 to blogs in rural areas and from cyberactivism to monetising your blog.

But did the African blogosphere really change since last years’ DCI?

Arthur Goldstuck from the South African Internet research company World Wide Worx argues that it did. By the end of August he counted 25 037 South African blogs. To explain this phenomenon Goldstuck refers to the launch of five webtools that simplify the lives of bloggers and readers of blogs. The first one is Afrigator, the first-ever African blog aggregator on the continent. The launch of Amatomu and My Digital Life, both South African blog trackers, and the start of the new daily The Times newspaper that uses multi-media and social network tools are the other tools. There was also a rise in the number of South Africans on Facebook: from 80 000 at the end of June to 244 000 on the 5th of September.

A more practical example of the impact of blogs in South Africa was given by Guy Berger, Head of the School of Journalism at Rhodes University in Grahamstown. During his presentation at DCI he referred to a blogger who published a list of prominent South Africans on his weblog and stated that he had sex with them when he worked as a sexworker.

The story turned out to be a lie but within a week newspapers, online news websites and the blogosphere were writing about it. What we couldn’t think of a year ago now happened: a South African blogger faced criminal charges and a member of parliament shouted that the South African blogosphere needs to be regulated. This takes South Africa down a long dark path of the old endless discussion: how to regulate information on the Internet? And what are bloggers allowed or not allowed to publish?

Changes across the continent

Besides the obvious changes in the South African blogosphere the rest of the continent is also moving. There are still many challenges but most delegates and speakers at this years’ DCI are positive.

Remmy Nweke, senior ICT journalist in Nigeria, argues that “prices of owning a personal computer and other Internet tools continue to reduce and more and more journalists grasp the opportunity of blogging to increase local content on the continent”. Nweke gives his own blog as an example.

The situation is different in Ethiopia. Habtamu Dugo, a lecturer from Ethiopia, explains that there is still a filtering regime in place. “Because of the filtering system Ethiopians don’t have access to numerous popular blogs and news websites”. Dugo blogs anonymously because of the press freedom restrictions he encounters.

Blogging in kiSwahili

KiSwahili, an African language spoken in fifteen countries, has found itself a place in the African blogosphere. It was not a point of discussion at last years’ DCI but this year Ansbert Ngumuro from Free Media explain clarifies its importance: “it makes blogs accessible to around 100 million people who all speak kiSwahili, most of them do not master English or French”. Examples of kiSwahili blogs are Ngumuro’s and Ndesanjo Macha’s from Global Voices Online.

A list of the speakers and their presentations is available on the DCI website.

They translate Dutch words directly into English or make Dutch words sound English. It becomes even funnier when Dutch phrases and expressions are translated literally when their meaning is meant figuratively. A perfect book for another English lecture!

Let me give you two examples from the book of the type of ‘Dutchified English’ that is called Denglish by Rijkens.

The Dutch say: “Hij heeft er geen kaas van gegeten”, if you translate this expression directly it will say: “He did not eat any cheese of it” … What the Dutch person is trying to say is: “He doesn’t know the first thing about it”

Another example:

The Dutch say: “Je bent op glad ijs”, if you translate this in Denglish it will say “You are on glad ice”… What the Dutch person is trying to say is “You’re skating on thin ice”.

For the English lecture at the School of Journalism tomorrow I’ll compile a list of the funniest Denglish and promote the book a bit, I think many students need it.

Before you realise it’s Friday and a whole week of publishing about fact checking is over. The first year journalism students in Utrecht were taught to work in a Content Management System, to phone journalists and sources to confront them with the facts from the articles, upload their post and multimedia onto the blog and interview guest speakers.

The week combined practical work, journalistic basics (fact checking) and multimedia blogging in one. Some of the findings are remarkable, like press releases that newspapers just copy and paste without checking  (also copying mistakes) and publishing graphics about the US elections with the wrong amount and numbers.

There are also newspaper articles with only one source (while we all know that one source equals no source) and articles were the opinion of the journalist is difficult to distinguish from the facts.

Most students are positive, giving responses like

“I couldn’t believe that we were able to find so many mistakes and write so many blog posts in just one week”

to

“I’m glad that I now understand how a CMS works, I can now post my own blog and that is good to know”

It was a great pleasure to work with about 25 enthusiastic, clever, first year Journalism students and to be able to pass on my practical knowledge and examples. I would also like to thank our guest speakers Miro Lucassen, Patrick Pouw, Peter Olsthoorn, Thom Meens and Patricia de Rijck who were all able to keep the students motivated and answered all their questions patiently.

These practical lectures can easily be adapted into a Master Class in journalism or be part of a media training for beginning journalists. If you need more information you can always e-mail Elvira.