Grassroots Media Efforts

Reporter.co.za (South Africa)

http://www.reporter.co.za/

One of the most important things we will achieve with www.reporter.co.za is to give you, the public, the right to determine what you regard as "news". Now is the time to start making your views felt. We would like to see more articles from you on topics which you would never find in the usual printed or online newspaper.

It will take us time to find out what our readers and contributors deem to be important. At the moment we all really only have other newspapers to base expectations on - but we need to break the mould.

The opportunity to make changes is endless. For instance, what about using recipes on the homepage?

Could we lead an edition with a film or album review?

What about a good joke every day? Just think about it.

Why shouldn’t a crime report be written as a poem?

What about sneaking an exclusive photograph of a soon-to-be-opened restaurant’s interior design?

This is not our wish list – these are examples of how you could start seeing the contents of this product.

What we are trying to say is: PLEASE THINK OUTSIDE OF THE BOX.

In questioning what constitutes news, it may be worth considering an international trend towards "good news"

or "happy news". This is not to say that tragedies, crimes and scandals are not newsworthy – it just makes the point that stories that warm the heart and raise a smile could be just as important to a product.

Is a report about a housing development where the residents feel let down by shoddy workmanship more important than one about how owning their own home has totally changed the lives of families in another housing complex? Should we only report about the street with the highest crime rate in the country – or should we also be finding the safest street?

Is the release of a new album by the country’s top pop group more or less important than the release of a report into mismanagement of a municipal rubbish dump?

Or are they equally relevant? Now you can decide.

We may all need to change our way of thinking...which is not easy. That will be especially true for those of us who have been trained on newspapers and magazines – we are bound to have internalized traditional news values.

Come on reporters, CHANGE THE WAY WE SEE NEWS!

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January 11, 2006 | E-MAIL | PRINT | PERMALINK | COMMENTS()

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