Journalists are like high wire artists: magnificent when they get it right, but with a long way to fall when they get it wrong. And the difference is often only a shift in balance. The Caser Semenya story is a case in point.
Continue Reading 3 comments September 17th, 2009
The Mail & Guardian is in a real fix: how can it stand by a reporter who did not take notes in a major interview which has caused a national furore?
Continue Reading 1 comment August 28th, 2009
The Times today boldly turned its front page on the side and splashed its cover over front and back - as a bold welcome to our athletic star, Caster Semenya. I detect a note of guilt in their treatment of the story.
Continue Reading 2 comments August 25th, 2009
Independent News and Media journalists are putting together a trust to bid for a stake in the local company. But they may end up bidding against their own bosses.
Continue Reading Add comment August 5th, 2009
The Daily Dispatch of East London, a relatively small newspaper, is experimenting with new media in a way that is showing up their much larger, wealthier colleagues.
Continue Reading 1 comment August 5th, 2009
I have had an interesting response to my article on Independent News and Media and my hope that ownership of their South African assets should come home. Must fun was the exchange with some senior former Indie journalists on Politicsweb.
Continue Reading Add comment July 28th, 2009
The best news of the week is that Tony O’Reilly’s Independent News and Media may have to sell its South African assets, including its 14 newspaper titles. I can think of no South Africans that will lament ownership of these assets coming home - and the prospect of a new media owner emerging.
Continue Reading 2 comments July 20th, 2009
Just as momentum is building around finding ways for news operations to charge for their information on the Web, one key thinker has said this is a waste of time. Chris Anderson, the respected editor of Wired, has published Free, which argues that - like the music - industry we have to accept that all information is fighting to be free on the internet, and one has to find other ways to make it pay.
Continue Reading Add comment July 20th, 2009
South African media companies are producing better-than-expected results, despite the downturn in advertising.
Continue Reading 3 comments July 2nd, 2009
When Heather Brooke was a journalism student in the US, she applied to see her congressman’s expenses. She received all the receipts within three days. Back in England, and shortly after that country’s Freedom of Information Act came into force, she became something of a freelance campaigner, sending off information requests to dozens of state institutions.
Continue Reading Add comment June 11th, 2009
Journalism as we know it today – the active collection, verification and processing of news for audiences by dedicated reporters - evolved early in the 18th century in London and a little later in the US. There was news before that, and there were newspapers before that, certainly, and these papers had correspondents around the country and the world, but this was the first time that individuals were hired for the distinct purpose of following news events and writing them up for their newspapers.
Continue Reading 17 comments June 8th, 2009
Ferial Haffajee surprised most people when she announced - rather precipitously - that she was abandoning the Mail & Guardian editorship for City Press. It was a big shift for her, and an even bigger one for City Press.
Continue Reading 6 comments April 29th, 2009
Newspapers have been in trouble for some time. But the current economic downturn, and the drop in advertising expenditure that came with it, have speeded things up dramatically.
Continue Reading 5 comments April 29th, 2009
Professor Anton Harber directs the Journalism and Media Studies Programme at Wits University. He is former editor of the Mail & Guardian.
Full bio
Among the main results from the World Association of Newspaper’s Newsroom Barometer (a survey of 700 editors and senior news execs in 120 countries) for this year:
- 86% believe integrated print and online newsrooms will become the norm, and 83% believe journalists will be expected to be able to produce content for all media within five years.
- Two-thirds believe some editorial functions will be outsourced, despite frequent newsroom opposition to the practice.
- A plurality - 44% - believe on-line will be the most common platform for reading news in the future, compared with 41% last year. Thirty-one cited print (down from 35% last year), 12% mobile and 7% e-paper. The rest were unsure.
- A majority of editors - 56%- believe news in the future will be free, up from 48% from last year’s survey. Only one-third believe the news will remain paid for, while 11% were unsure. - From Editors’ Weblog
There is a crisis in trust and communication between the British public and the mainstream media, a new report has concluded. The gulf between public expectations of news provision and the actual nature of articles, which oscillate between esoteric or irresponsible, leaves readers feeling confused and excluded.
The report, entitled ‘Public Trust In The News’ was conducted by researchers from Manchester and Leeds Universities and was published by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. - From Editors Weblog
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)
A recent piece by me on the Zapiro cartoon row which appeared in Comment is Free, a Guardian blog.
