I’ve definitely learned a lot from the journalism work that I’ve done this term. And this is entirely due to the practical work that I have done producing stories as part of the small, informal news agency which I was required to form with Ian, Tim and Nompumezo. I wholeheartedly agree with the idea that journalism is something you can only really learn by doing.
There are several quite separate stages to publishing a news story. First there is coming up with the story idea. Then there is researching the story. Then there is writing the story. Then there is marketing the story. Through most of these, there is the business of working in a group. In this reflection I will examine each of these areas individually.
Finding Story Ideas
I am so incredibly grateful for how pushy I was at the beginning of the term when we were deciding on group beats. Not only did our group secure the academic beat, but we managed to extend the beat to include all areas of academic life at Rhodes. This meant that we had enough story possibilities to satisfy a team three or four times our size. One thing which became very clear was that there are a lot of things going on in Rhodes University that never get reported. There is enough going on in Grahamstown as a whole for the local student newspapers to publish only two or three academic stories every edition. And Grocotts Mail or the bigger regional papers only pick up the really big ones. What this means is that, contrary to what one might think, many potential sources have never really had much to do with student reporters, and are very, very willing to engage with us.
The most obvious stories can all be gleaned from the mailing lists, and most local newsrooms clearly rely on these. Because we were such a small group, it was easy for us to do the same. It is clear that very little in depth searching for stories or investigative journalism takes place. This is the sort of thing that you need if you want to uncover scandals and really exciting pieces. I did just a tiny bit of this sort of investigation, and the results were fantastic. One example was going to the Sasco general meeting, just in case something interesting happened. This was how I got the Youth day exams story.
I also asked every source that I interviewed if they knew of any interesting stories which they thought might be worth reporting. I got a whole lot of good things from this, although almost all of it is stuff which is going to happen next term. Most of them involve particular meetings where ground-breaking decisions are going to be made about various aspects of the university and its future. None of these meetings are formally advertised to students or student newspapers, and the only way you can find out about their significance is if someone involved tells you about it. It is very unfortunate that many of these highly important decisions never get properly reported to the university community - it seems administration rely mostly on closed circuit mailing lists and ‘the grapevine’ more than anything else. And this is not their problem – it should be the job of journalists to find out what’s going on, not just wait to be told. Of course, this does involve a lot of work.
I had originally anticipated exploiting my friendship with Kathryn Furman, the SRC Academic Rep who goes to many of the high-level meetings to let me know what was going on. But she was either very bored by everything, or just being incredibly cagey. It was fine the way it was, because there was very little pressure to find stories. But if this hadn’t been the case, it might have been interesting to see what we came up with. In the end all of my stories were news stories of varying degrees of hardness. At the beginning we brain-stormed ideas for a range of different feature articles. In the end, I think we only produced one or two between the whole agency.
Researching the story
The wonderful thing about having a surplus of story possibilities was that you got to pick and choose stories that interested you. This made researching the story – be it with interviews or going along to an event – a much more interesting, painless business.
I really appreciated the experience I got in interviewing people. It is wonderful when you can interview someone in such a way that it’s not really an interview but rather an in-depth discussion between the two of you about something which you both have reason to be interested in. On two occasions the person that I interviewed said that they had really enjoyed the interview because it made them think about what was being discussed in a different way, or from a different perspective.
It also made a big difference if I could maintain an engagement with the person before, during and after the event, with email correspondence, face-to-face communication, and phone calls. Often it took ages to pin a person down, but rather than being annoyed people seem to really appreciate this ongoing communication. It also means you get to know them a bit, and makes interviews and correspondence easier because there is some level of personal engagement on both sides. I also always made it clear that I was on their side – if they wanted to see it before it got published, I sent it to them and I always sent the published article to them afterwards.
Researching stories was made much more effective by working around a specific beat and focusing only on certain kinds of stories that interested me. This was because there was often a little bit of overlap, which allowed me to have a slightly different perspective, and to ask question with a bit of background knowledge. I was also more aware of all the developments in this beat, and could refer to what I knew. This made me come across as knowledgeable and informed, and clearly impressed sources. For instance, everyone kept referring to how things were going to change when the VC got involved, and I as able to talk about his trip overseas and exactly when he would be getting back to sort things out. For the Academic Development story, I could talk about what Russell Kaschula had said about the issue when I interviewed him for the Translate@thon story, and what Leonhard Praeg had said in his lecture. These kind of connections were great for building confidence and making me come across as well informed and ‘in the know’, which really made people open up more and take me seriously.
Writing the stories
It was amazing how quickly my writing has improved across this term. I don’t think the finished products were that much better, but the process of putting a story together became much easier and quicker. It also made researching stories much easier – I knew exactly what I was looking for, and didn’t waste time on unnecessary sidetracks. Also, looking back at the stuff I wrote at the beginning of the term, there’s a lot of stuff I wanted to change. Is this what always happens when you have a bit of retrospective perspective, or did I become a better writer? Regardless, going back and reading stuff after a few days is definitely a fantastic way to improve writing.
Marketing the stories
This was by far my weakest area. Although I published most of my stories in some or other form, there were a number of problems, and I could have had my work much more widely published.
The first big problem was that I insisted on sending all of my articles to Activate. This was just the easiest, simplest option for me, because I write for the paper all the time anyway (although I’m not officially a part of it), and I know everyone involved. I’ve also been writing for them for the last two years. And I have a long-standing feud with the editor of Oppie Press. I realised that I shouldn’t have been sending my stories to Activate, and it was made very clear, time and again. My articles were badly subbed, or often not even included in the print edition. There were a number of reasons why this happened.
Firstly, I have a very different idea of what constitutes a worthwhile story compared to the Activate editors. I would argue that I have a better idea of what constitutes a good story, but this is not the place to debate this. I also write in a very different style to what they expect. This means that my stories have to be automatically reformatted. I refuse to conform to their house style, and it’s obvious that I shouldn’t be writing for them if I can’t do this. Yet I still do. I am too loyal.
My articles were probably also a bit long. I tended to get very interested and write very long, involved articles. I don’t know whether or not this is a good thing. I didn’t feel like I was including unimportant or completely superfluous detail. But it did mean that often everything except the bare facts had to be removed. I should really have had better communication with the editors to find out exactly how many words they wanted.
Another problem was that I didn’t take pictures. This almost certainly made it more difficult to get stories published. No matter how good the story is, in Activate it seems that a story without a picture will usually lose out to one with a picture. I was so frustrated by this at one stage that I ordered a R5000 camera from the US.
The last problem was that I didn’t market my stories to other papers. At three of the events I went to there were representatives from all the other local and regional papers. When I read the stories they wrote, they were usually much worse than the ones I had written. But some of mine were never published in print, not even in Activate. I could have easily just offered to write stories for Mike Loewe or for Grocott’s. And I will never get over how irritating it is that there are stories about Rhodes which Activate isn’t interested in printing even though The Herald is.
Working in a group
Our groupwork definitely benefited from the fact that there were just four of us, and we were all quite passive but reasonably well motivated. There was almost no competition over stories, and everyone cooperated easily. There was no pressure on anyone to contribute, and for the most part this was fine.
One possible source of tension which never really materialised was the fact that Ian, as Content Editor for Activate, was partly responsible for choosing whether my stories got printed or not. There was never any tension about this, and its probably just the kind of people we are – reasonably non-confrontational.
The groupwork was very useful for story conceptualising and planning sources, etc. Although I helped a couple of times with contacts for the other group members’ stories, I worked completely independently for all of mine.
Ian did help a bit with marketing the stories, and also subbed a few of them. This was helpful, but not in any way essential. We felt compelled to get a bit more involved in each other’s work than we otherwise would have, because of the idea of the ‘News Agency’. However on such a small scale, and with so much time, it made more sense to work fairly independently. There was no real structural basis to our group work, apart from the need to avoid clashing on stories and maybe contribute story ideas.
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