The Journalism, Development and Democracy(JDD) and media production has made a huge impact on our identities as professional journalists. Throughout our Journalism course at Rhodes we have been taught how to write in a certain way and we have been moulded in a certain type of journalist, for example the more mainstream type of journalism. The JDD course allowed us to explore different ways and means of producing journalism that ensures that we connect with the grassroots of communities and take on a mores hands on approach to journalism.
Christians’ idea of the facilitative role that journalists play has particularly made an impact on our identity as journalist students. This has changed our identity as students because it has shown us an alternative form of journalism, one that aims at helping the community help themselves and take on a more active role within the community. In first year our impression of journalism was that it was objective, however, we were taught that no journalism is objective. Through the JDD course, we have in fact learnt that subjective journalism is better than simply trying to be objective and report facts, because as Rod said, by standing back and remaining silent, we are choosing a side (Amner 2010). The truth in the statement remained with me with throughout the course and the truth in the words proved true through our media production. By being subjective towards a certain side, one’s media production automatically becomes more compelling and interesting to read. I found that this had a huge impact on my identity as a professional journalist because it has changed the way I want to produce media, and the way that I look at media productions.
By being exposed to different types of roles that we as journalists can play, I have eliminated the roles that I do not play. Therefore, certain production
Through the media production side of this course, we have been able to experience what it is like to play the facilitative role in a community. At first we were cautious of this new type of journalism and the fact that we had to get involved in people’s lives and we were particularly concerned about the negative impact that our journalism would have on the community once we had left. However, as the course progressed we realised what it really means to be this kind of journalist.
The problem that we found most compelling in the community was the complete lack of hope. The concept of the facilitative role is to create awareness and help the community find solutions to their problems, and create a public sphere were public deliberation can occur. The media production aspect has had a major impact on our identity as journalists. Because we undertook the facilitative role, our aim was to help the community and create awareness. By becoming personally involved, it has affected our sense of identity because we feel accepted by the community. We have established a healthy relationship with them and they now know and respect us.
Something that has had a positive impact on our identity is that we feel that we are actually helping the community instead of simply reporting back their problems to them. By showing them that they can help themselves and being able to give them the inspiration what they need has been extremely rewarding. It has given us a sense of belonging and achievement.
As a pair we produced a tabloid that was produced together with one other writer and one other communication designer. The written work produced by Kate, the writer showed an interest in playing the deliberative role, in the community. The content was deliberative, in that it got the community to speak out and discuss issues that were close and prominent to their particular community. In response to the communities pleas and what we had identified we played a facilitative role, by helping the community help itself. The facilitative role is Christians et al’s (2009: 126) second suggestion. This is where journalism is practiced in order to improve the quality of public life and add to deliberative forms of democracy. On our trip to put the wall tabloids up we realised just how much the community is in need of a space to identify and recognise those in their community that were featured in the newspapers and delight in being recognised. One of the children, after seeing the yellow mini-bus taxi that was in our collage commented by saying, “Whoo, imoto le’izakuba-famous.”, which means this car is going to be famous, which for me showed that the community really just wants to be recognised as more than just a small town with minimal resources, but as a town with opportunities and people in the community that can be looked up to, and that play a part in developing the community.
As Riebeeck East is a very small town, we found that everybody who looked at the publication could recognise everyone in the newspaper. What was gained was a sense of humility in identifying with the community. When interviewing the community we had to learn to approach in a manner that didn’t make the feel like they were animals in a zoo or specimens that would just have information sucked out of them and then spewed out to the general society. We had to find the balance between accurate reporting and subjectivity in order to gain trust from the community members.
The focus of the product that we produced was to create a developmental journalism and to identify the negative and positive types of development in the community. The positive aspects are the roads and transport initiative, which the whole community seems to be aware of. The negative is the fact that there is a perfectly good building in the town, ‘Piet Retief building” that isn’t being used in a positive way.
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