‘No, no no! They’re not voiceless,’ asserts Ina Skosana, hands buried deep in her volumous weave in feigned exasperation. Her ordinarily grinning face is now creased as the Health-e News editor pans the room as if to make sure that what she has to say next will not fall on unattentive ears. ‘We .. we just have the microphone.’
The community journalists (CJs) – all sixteen of them – cogitate. Some nod, a few “aahs” punctuate the conference room in Randburg as the basic idea of why they’ve all been invited to this workshop soon begins to unravel itself.
As far as the stakes go, they’re nothing special. Not many awards amongst them. Few bylines in esteemed media. But here the footsoldiers – formally known as community journalists – are, thinking, engaged, and pondering if there is anything inherently worthwhile about their lowly cause. Or, for that matter, if they wouldn’t be doing the dependents a favour by ditching the whole freelance thing for a regular nine to five. Besides, why are they at it anyway? It’s the honourable thing to do? To save the day? One thing for sure: it’s not for the money because unless you’re Rian Malan or somebody, there’s probably not much of it to go around.
Plucked from across eight provinces and thrust into a media industry that is, by default, fast maligning the grassroots voice, systematically outrunning it out of the broader narrative, these people are the ones whose duty it is to ensure that the downtrodden are heard despite the changing landscape.
These are the people who go to places that are too far, or too small or simply not important enough for big media cameras. The ones who board a taxi to the squatter camp, tell the story of the ailing gogo who was turned away from the clinic without her chronic medication or brace to meet the young tik addict who was once a hopeful student.
Listen, it would be pretty costly for, let’s say, Daily Maverick (DM) to fly a hack over to Giyani. Giyani, dude, I mean could you point it out on a map? Just one of those remote outposts in Limpopo, a place Israel calls home, where he writes particularly on service delivery matters. He’s not really blowing his own horn but he believes that before he’d started publishing on the DM, local politicians were often taking residents for a ride. The usual impunity. No accountability.
Then word got around that Israel had penned an open letter on the DM website, and to the community he became something of a local hero, the sort of guy they readily wanted to vote into a ward committee responsibility. As part of that ward committee, he is still deeply invested in publishing stories on the small town of his upbringing. And, officials are well aware that he’s the nosy guy who’s always sniffing around at the slightest hint of misgovernance.
There is Bernard Chiguvare who sometimes brings the daily struggles of rural communities into sharp focus. Phumzile Mkhungo is a restless crusader in KZN, Molefi Sompane in the Free State. The network stretches throughout the country because Health-e, like GroundUp or Bhekisisa Centre for Health Journalism, have realised the importance of not only health but its social determinants particularly in the public sector on which the nation’s poorest are solely dependant.
Their scope of interest focuses on everything from housing, education, income, the environment and so forth because health does not function in a vacuum. Central to the mission is to equip their CJs with the skills to craft compelling, impactful stories that inform, engage and motivate the readership. Their CJs straddle a line between activists who advocate for social justice and journalists who report on issues of access that directly affect the communities in which they operate.
The publication’s managing editor Bibi-Aisha Wadvalla, a fossil in Mzansi’s journalism scene is a stickler for trends and the shifts in the industry. From eNCA, the SABC and an arm-long list of international publications, she’s been around the block long enough to know that traditional media – in all its forms – is a dying horse and in order to sustain it the industry must embrace new ways of doing. From broadsheets to prime time news, the smartphone has taken over and instead of turning on the television, people mostly turn to their smartphones to be kept in the know. Bet you had no idea that some 23 million people use TikTok in South Africa. This naturally means that this is the territory that the journalist must navigate to reach his audience. So, gone are the days where the newshound stuck to a single discipline like writing. Now he has to be the versatile, adaptable all-in-one who takes the pictures, edits the videos and writes the story.
Furthermore, what the literature suggests is that in the Gen Z era, text alone will not optimize a publication’s reach. For that, multimedia as well as the ubiquitous content creation have become the new battleground. Because the smartphone has reduced the ‘friction’ of accessing news in that it is no longer necessary to go out to the store, pick out a paper, pay for it, drive back home before sitting down to read it, now you can simply, for example, ‘listen’ to the article while doing the chores.
This is the direction taken by established houses where stories are often accompanied by video or audio material. For the community journalist in small or rural communities, this is a game changer, potentially capable of giving them a reach that was virtually unattainable in the time of traditional media and hard copy.
For Health-e News the core idea is to humanise media, framing concepts like inequality not just as a statistic but a real face of, let’s say, the shack dweller waiting for the day he might finally have access to dignified housing. It is such stories about people, real people with real worries and who are wondering who will have their best interests at heart in the upcoming local government elections.