RUTV 3

A personal documentary about the unexplored perceptual problems facing those in inter-nationality relationships, particularly in a highly volatile xenophobic climate that is South Africa at this time. This docci profiles two university students, a South African, the other Zimbabwean in a long-term relationship and uncovers the usually unsaid opinions each have of one another, and one another’s countries, based on their nationality.

This documentary aims to show how not every member of the ANC or of the ANCYL is not the same, some of us do it because we want to bring about change within society and because of tenders and power.

By Tessa Trafford and Nicole Bloch.

Citizen journalism refers to the gathering, analysing and reporting of news by community members. Grocott’s Mail opened a Citizen journalist Newsroom in September 2009, and has since been training pro-active community members to become journalists. As part of this project, television journalism students from Rhodes University joined with the citizen journalist to further train them in the broadcast medium.

The citizen journalism project turned out to be a challenging journey for us as well as for Noxolo Saki, the citizen journalist. In order to be able to teach more efficiently after a short term of doing television journalism ourselves, we decided to make a manual for Noxolo which included basic information on filming, searching for a story and editing. The first big obstacle however was to get Noxolo a phone with video, as she did not have access to one. It would have been possible to get a different citizen journalist with a phone but we did not want to disappoint Noxolo and we did everything in our power to keep her in our team. A Journalism and Media Studies professor at Rhodes University then provided financial support in order to get Noxolo a phone for the project. The search for a phone and the fact that Noxolo has a two year old child caused huge time constraints. Although Noxolo started out extremely shy and did not know how to look for a good story, she soon came out of her shell and started to show some good results. In order to get some practise Noxolo was required to film a short video clip. Noxolo decided to film a clip on a church group donating boxes of fruit to the House of Joy, where many orphaned children are staying. In the clip, the owner of the house gives thanks to God.

After having had this practice Noxolo started to film for the main project. She focused on a story about litter being dumped behind a crèche in Joza, which is affecting the health of children and angers community members. The crèche is opposite Noxolo’s house making this a personal issue as well as one of great importance to the community. This makes the story hyper-local. One of the major advantages of Citizen Journalism is that community members can let their voices be heard about issues that other journalists may not be aware of.

The highlight of the citizen journalism project was the talkshow, where Noxolo’s video was played alongside that of the other citizen journalists. The video was followed by an in-studio discussion where Noxolo, who was part of the audience,  was able take part in the show. To get the full story, plus more pictures and video clips, go to our timeline:

This gives you a timeline, with information and images, of the citizen journalism project.

From this project we learnt that teaching is a two way process. While we taught Noxolo about the world of broadcasting and how to create effective videos with a cell phone, we in turn learnt new skills from Noxolo as well as from the teaching process itself.

By: Zikhona Masala and Pumelela Nqelenga

The collaboration of JMS3 students along with Citizen Journalist trainees from local newspaper Grocott’s Mail was comprised of 6 weeks of basic journalism training. As JMS3 students our mandate was to work in a team with citizen journalist trainees throughout the duration of 2^nd term. However this was not without any challenges, we had to school ourselves in using a new programme Windows Movie Maker instead of the usual Adobe Premier when compiling stories, on the other hand teaching the citizen journalist as well as having to send out search parties in order to make sure that our citizen journalist was on track with assignments. Our citizen journalist was Zoli Pamela Sakata a communications major who because of this already had a general idea about interviewing techniques, camera shots which were all done using her Samsung B3310 cellphone.

Another challenge was the use of cellphone’s as citizen journalism requires instead of using television cameras. Often the camera quality was not as good as it would have been on an actual TV camera but we did manage to find ways in minimizing such encounters. The upside of using a cellphone was that we didn’t have to carry heavy and huge camera’s, this made it easy for our citizen journalist to move around easily when capturing footage.  Our duty was to help and guide our citizen journalist’s through using a cellphone and making video clips that would be used by a news organisation, in this case it was for the Grocott’s Mail website.

Zoli learnt the skill of taking shots using the 6 seconds rule, getting B-roll and cutaways, sequencing, capturing, working with audio and doing narrations. As part of our duty we also had to help and work with her in the process of finding viable story angles that would be suitable for the television medium in particular. Looking back at the very beginning of the course, the first video clip that our citizen journalist took, it is visible that there has been tremendous improvement in terms of ideas and the footage that our citizen journalist is now able to do. During this process as JMS 3 students we were not just teaching the citizen journalists, we were also learning by showing them the ropes, we are confident that Zoli is now well equipped to provide her community with good quality news of public interest and will hopefully continue using her cellphone as a tool to do so.

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Martin Lund, a fourth year art student talks about what art means to him and how it can change the lives of young children in South Africa.