The Times takes a big step forward in the next few months, when it will be sold on the streets for the first time. This is a move likely to shake up the newspaper market significantly.
Continue Reading 3 comments January 8th, 2008
I have been silent on the Times, the daily paper for Sunday Times subscribers, because it is always too easy to criticise a new paper before it has time to find its feet. But I am ready to make some tentative observations.
Continue Reading 1 comment July 15th, 2007
YouTube has teamed up with CNN and Google to do their own US presidential debates later this year. Anyone will be able to post questions to the candidates via a YouTube video.
Continue Reading 1 comment June 20th, 2007
It is an old Washington technique to distract attention from a breaking story by dumping huge amounts of documents on the media at awkard times, hoping journalists would drown in it, and miss the story. But the work of a website, which got dozens of people spread across the country to read and analyse a set of documents, meant that such a move backfired on the Bush White House. It is a fascinating tale of the power of the web.
Continue Reading Add comment March 21st, 2007
This story revolves around a mystery woman called Zeng. And it takes place in an online discussion group. It is a tale of how, even in virtual reality, when we can’t see skin colour or hear accents and everyone can hide behind nicknames, a person’s race can still shape how we view them and what they say.
Continue Reading 2 comments August 16th, 2006
If you want evidence of how much advertising is changing, look at the company Microsoft has just bought, called Massive.
Continue Reading 1 comment May 6th, 2006
You want to understand the impact of censorship? Nothing shows it more clearly than a comparison between the search results for images of Tiananmen Square on Google with the one you get on Google China. Nothing more need be said.
Continue Reading Add comment February 26th, 2006
It was a newspaper that started the latest debate about blogs and blogging. Trevor Butterworth wrote eloquently in the Financial Times of the “dismal fate of blogging: it renders the word even more evanescent than journalism”. But the debate quickly moved to blogs. Blogs about blogs. And that’s the point, isn’t it? Blogs don’t replace conventional journalism, but they do add considerably to the discussion and debate that arises out of it.
Continue Reading Add comment February 19th, 2006
Johncom’s new website — www.reporter.co.za — highlights the potential and limitations of the new craze for citizen journalism.
Continue Reading 1 comment February 8th, 2006
Professor Anton Harber directs the Journalism and Media Studies Programme at Wits University. He is former editor of the Mail & Guardian.
Full bio
Daily newspaper sales, South Africa
(Ave sales Jul-Dec)
1960 - 681 053 (Population 17,3m)
1970 - 723 566 (22m)
1980 - 803 229 (27,5m)
1990 - 1 214 396 (35,2m)
2000 - 1 117 886 (44m)
2006 - 1 600 000 (47,3m)
2011 - 1 310 000 (49m)
(Sources: ABC and nationmaster.com)
“It was pure political theatre. The excited room was filled with government officials, government consultants, quasi-government agencies, politicians and pupils from government schools. As if on cue, the room rang with applause as one education victory after another was claimed. This was, after all, the annual drama in which the minister of basic education appears on stage to announce the Grade 12 National Senior Certificate (NSC) results …” - Educationist Jonathan Jansen, one of the few with the credibility to look critically at this “celebratory orgy of mediocrity”.
“The (Incwala) ceremony is cloaked in secrecy and marks the (Swaziland) king’s return to public life after a period of withdrawal and spiritual contemplation. Among its highlights is a symbolic demonstration by the king of his power and dominance in a process involving his penetration of a black bull … But last year’s selected bull, according to a recent account from a whistle-blowing Incwala initiate, objected strongly, and threw off Africa’s last absolute monarch.” - Some surprises in this (un-bylined) account of Swaziland politics in Southern African Report
“When the Great Zucchini arrived that Saturday morning, Don had no idea who he was. Frankly, he didn’t look like a great anything. He looked like a house painter, Don thought, with some justification. He wears no costume. He was in painter’s pants, a coffee-stained shirt and a two-day growth of beard. He toted his beat-up props in beat-up steamer trunks, with ripped faux leather and broken hinges hanging askew.” - A classic of magazine profiling, by Gene Weingarten of the Washington Post.
Diepsloot (Jonathan Ball, 2011)
Diesploot: Of Frogs and Fractals, a public lecture at the University of Johannesburg, 4 August 2011
Introduction - The Troublemakers: An account of the rise of a new wave of investigative journalism in South Africa.
What is Left Unsaid: Reporting the South African HIV Epidemic, edited by Kristin Palitza, Natalie Ridgard, Helen Struthers and Anton Harber (Fanele, 2010)
Reflections on Journalism in the Transition to Democracy - Ethics & International Affairs 18, no. 3 (2004).
Journalism in the Age of the Market
- Harold Wolpe Memorial Lecture, Centre for Civil Society, University of KZN, Aug 2002
The Untimely Death of SA’s Finest Daily - Sunday Times, May 2005
“Two Newspapers, Two Nations? The Media and the Xenophobic Violence” from Go Home or Die Here, edited by Shireen Hassim Tawana Kupe and Eric Worby (WUP, 2008)
Remarks at Goedgedacht Forum, October 2008
The rise of social network journalism - From The 2009 Flux Trend Review (Macmillan, 2008)
