Annie and Des

As a pair, our journalistic process in developing our story has been greatly based upon the public’s interest and their agenda. We largely reflect Haas’s (2007) stance that a public journalist’s primary role is to help create a deliberating public by opening up and sustaining a public sphere to which all citizens have access and all opinions can be evaluated. The goal of public deliberation is to lead and help citizens reflect on their different concerns, it also helps citizens gauge the importance of various issues over all social groups. This was achieved as Annie and I simply did not enter the community of Riebeeck East, ask questions and report on what was told to us. Rather we spoke to a number of community members and identified the problem of youth idleness as an issue. 

From this, we further investigated what solutions the community was organising in order to fix the chosen issue. By rather reporting on this proactive side of the story, we would be able to direct the public to viewing a situation where the problem actually had a solution instead of us simply reporting on their problem which they already know about. This is the type of development journalism we aimed for; one where the community would feel empowered or inspired to become proactive in Riebeeck East.

A key idea in Haas’s (2007) public philosophy for public journalism is that journalists must be aware of how some citizens may be silenced due to a number of reasons, and such citizens must be approached on an equal footing so as to hear their opinion. Journalists should keep the public deliberation as open and inclusive as possible; we did this by completing a large number of in depth surveys in Riebeeck East, speaking to people of all ages, races, religions etc. Thus we are making a number of public spheres, allowing the thoughts and feeling of the citizens to transcend these spheres, but allowing deliberation sessions away from any other influential group. As a bonus, we were not only made aware of a pertinent issue in the community but also of a solution that the community had identified along with it.

Apart from this, we interviewed a number of public figures held in esteem in the town and compared their stance to the general stance of the surveys. By doing individual surveys and speaking one on one to members of the community, we were able to create a safe sphere of deliberation away from any other group, so as to ensure no one sphere is constantly overshadowed by one of more power.

There is the obvious question of who should set the media agenda. We realise that we are gatekeepers, and in such a broad circumstance such as a public survey, we have to chose which topics to cover and which to leave out, which opinions and quotes to use and which won’t be heard. Having this realisation helps journalists be mindful of citizen criticism, external to democratic processes. We chose to focus on the issue of the future of children in Riebeeck East as it tied in with our groups overall theme and it was a problem which the community had already taken steps to try rectify. By reporting on this solution and making it more public, we will be able to empower the community by giving them information they can use to better their lives.

By taking this approach to the media production, we feel that we far more became intermediaries within the public sphere of Riebeeck East, connecting them with an outside sphere that might be able to help them. All this whilst documenting their process and recording the strength to strength process that they are going through, with no actual investment from our side except distribution of the sound slide to the appropriate people. This will all change though, as we realise it is easy to be an objective third party at the start of a project, but the more we are involving ourselves with the crèche, the more we are trying to paint a positive, optimistic picture of the crèche in order to make it appealing to those who are not aware of this safe haven for many children of Riebeeck East.

With regard to the ideas raised in both the Journalism, Development and Democracy and Critical Media Production courses, we believe that our identities as professionalising journalists/media producers have been strongly impacted. We have gained a greater social awareness of which a lot of it is owed to the rural area in which our ward is found. This is because it forced us to really get to know the community in which we were working, as we were discovering it from scratch. This encouraged us to get to know individuals within the community and thus lead us to bond with the people we worked with within our given ward. Thus, we also strongly believe that the course taught us a lot by making us find the stories from the grass roots; the bottom up approach as opposed to the top down approach. This approach was truly rewarding as previously we were encouraged to find stories from authorities and professionals whereas now we are finding the stories ourselves from the people who are actually affected by them. Thus truly being a voice for the voiceless. We found this benefited our journalistic production as we felt a greater connection to the story we were covering and thus felt a greater obligation to tell the story to the best of our ability and really aim at getting an audience to sit up and listen to it, in so doing improving our skills as a professional journalist. Throughout the course we were not just practicing how to tell a journalistic story as before, but now we were really putting theory into practice, out of which many challenges faced us but in the end made the story all the more worth telling.

All in all we really learned and developed as a professional journalist from the ideas raised during the course as our journalistic identities have changed by gaining a greater social awareness and new journalistic skills.