Business Day editor Peter Bruce had a go in his column on Monday at the head of First National Bank for suggesting to his staff that they should stop their newspaper subscriptions - costing over R1-m a year - and read it all online. Bruce was being - I am afraid - struthious.
Continue Reading 3 comments September 18th, 2009
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
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)
