Our approach on Haas’s public journalism was a mixture of developmental journalism with an investigative side to it. Media outputs that we have created so far include an over view film on Alicedale . Also we conducted a public meeting which was held in Ward 9 and a Housing documentary on Riebeeck East. In the beginning whilst we were still collecting our data, we conducted surveys and engaged with the people in the community, this helped us in the process of narrowing down of our focus from on issues that were pertinent to the communities. Unfortunately because of logistics our focus had to change in terms of the area, as we moved from Alicedale to Riebeeck East which is also in Ward 3. This change did affect us in terms of the engagement that we had already made with the people of Alicedale. However the issues still stayed very similar if not almost the same, these were both small communities which were in the outskirts of Grahamstown. We have realised that the further out the communities are from the towns and developed areas, the more deprived of information they are when communication is concerned. Ultimately we did find that the people who we interviewed did not just see us as journalists but rather people that played a role in assisting them with further development within their communities. People we given the opportunity to voice out their opinions about their lives. We did not give them topics of discussion, instead the topics came from them, what we did was to facilitate that discussion further in order to get more in depth information on issues. The role of public journalism has shifted our mindsets from the role of the common good, to a stance where individuals can be dealt with independently. Journalists have a role to create a public sphere for citizens to engage. Haas (2007: 28)
The courses both brought about a practical perspective to the Journalism and Media Studies as a whole. It provided a way that was never there a few months ago. The whole idea of public journalism was different and challenging concept. As we went out to the communities in a quest for giving people a platform for them to voice out their opinions and not have us play a Journalistic role only to tell their stories for them, we put this theoretical concept into practice. During the time of filming the pieces for TV, although the people that we interviewed weren’t handling the camera, they did give us directions as to what shots they felt were important for the production of their story. Going into communities and engaging with them for more than one occasion for an entire term is simply a bonus for us as future journalists because in the working commercial world of media, there will be far shorter time frames on stories because one has to move on to the next story that will allow for more viewership. The experience of the course has definitely outlined a different perspective to public journalism. Seeing how people live and how they need assistance, as a journalist one can only imagine the vast need of journalists who are ultimately supposed to play a collaborative role with the community and convey the community’s thoughts and outcries to the relevant people who can assist them. There is a feeling that we have, to an extent, achieved such a platform. However there is another side to public journalism which is not assuring. When the same people are being interview year in by a different group of Journalists or JMS students and nothing has been done to improve their conditions, it is disheartening to see that they are getting tired of such activities, because hope won’t put food on the table at the end of the day.
Our main objective was to look at the development in Ward 3 and find out what these residents’ solutions could be and in turn find ways in which we could convey this information that we would gather o the relevant institutions and individuals i.e. Ward Councillors . Developmental Journalism was our main form of Journalism that we used. We also did not limit ourselves to one type of approach to journalism but rather used a set of approaches. For example we did provide an alternative journalism which took a different stance from the mainstream way of narrating through a story. We decided to give an opportunity for the people’s voices to speak for themselves; this is seen in out housing documentary. Unfortunately we did not full achieve our entire objectives since our focus group with the municipality did not go as planned. However the experience was worth the success and failures and this can be seen in our approach where the people of Riebeeck East demanded what was constitutionally theirs and that they were willing to change their circumstances. This draws back to the fact that our main aim was to look at the solutions that the citizens gave to their problem. This is very crucial because they are ultimately the ones who will know better as to what solutions can be made than journalists. This alludes to the fact that we are helping the citizens to help themselves. Moreover our main objective as was to find ways in helping the community to help themselves. We asked questions that probed on what the citizens themselves were doing in order to change their situations. There was very often a feeling of entitlement, these issues come together n our final housing documentary. Additionally what we found was that the television medium is very effective in terms of engaging people, because issues are heard and the people who are talking are seen visually. Most importantly the emotions that people convey about their struggles can be articulated through the television medium.
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