Every new media technology has evoked fears that it will introduce foreign and dangerous ideas, break down social structures, run out of control and reduce us all to blathering idiots. Take writing. “It crooks your back, it dims your sight, it twists your stomach and your sides,” a monk wrote in the margins of a manuscript he was copying in a medieval monastery.
Continue Reading 3 comments April 27th, 2010
There is growing consensus that Apple’s sleek and elegant iPad represents the future of newspapers, magazines and books.
Continue Reading 2 comments April 27th, 2010
Watch out when a publisher uses words like “excellence” and “holistic strategy”. Look carefully when they say they are promoting an editor because of increased readership. That’s what happened to Mondli Makhanya of the Sunday Times last week, when he was booted upstairs to the position of editor-in-chief of Avusa newspapers.
Continue Reading 2 comments April 27th, 2010
Friday is the deadline for a deal for Tony O’Reilly to sell the Independent in London to Russian mogul Alexander Lebedev. Let’s hold thumbs.
Continue Reading Add comment February 23rd, 2010
One of America’s most prestigious journalism prizes, the George Polk Award, has gone to the anonymous cellphone videographer who captured the dying moments of Iraqi protestor Neda Agha-Soltan.
Continue Reading 1 comment February 21st, 2010
We have received 32 entries for the 4th Taco Kuiper Award for Investigative Journalism, and are told another six are on the way. That’s three times more entries than last year.
Continue Reading Add comment February 21st, 2010
A UCT student has been arrested, had his house searched and been questioned about his political affiliations after gesturing at President Jacob Zuma’s convoy of vehicles, IOL reports. Remember this incident, because if the blue-light brigade are not pulled up for it, we will recall it as a turning point in freedom of expression and democracy.
Continue Reading Add comment February 17th, 2010
Are our editors giving up the fight for a journalism of quality and credibility?
Continue Reading Add comment February 17th, 2010
A few years ago, the Citizen newspaper made a big story out of remarks by commentator Max du Preez that then-president Thabo Mbeki was a womanizer. The president’s hired gun, Essop Pahad, intervened and the paper was made to climb down quickly.
Continue Reading 5 comments February 12th, 2010
A little over a year ago, award-winning British reporter Nick Davies turned his investigative skills on his colleagues in the media and produced a book called Flat Earth News. It shook up British journalism.
Continue Reading 1 comment February 12th, 2010
Fortunately, good sense has prevailed in the sage of the subpoena to force eTV to identify the criminals they recently interviewed. The police have reportedly agreed to follow the path of consultation and conflict-avoidance set out in the 1999 agreement between government and editors.
Continue Reading Add comment January 26th, 2010
These days I seem to get published more in Afrikaans than English. For Rapport, on Sunday, I wrote about my marriage … and Section 205 of the Criminal Procedure Act.
Continue Reading 1 comment January 25th, 2010
In Beeld this Saturday, I wrote of the implications of the Minister of Communications publishing what was the worst piece of draft legislation I have seen ever. What does it mean if one puts out a scrappy, contradictory, ill-considered Bill that has not even been discussed with your cabinet colleagues?
Continue Reading Add comment January 25th, 2010
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)
