Critical reflection on the course

I believe that one of the best features of this course has been the overall course design, and so this critical reflection will focus on the course design in general and its component parts. The course allowed us to work as a team and learn by experience in the field, but instruction on how to improve our writing was not neglected.

I thought that the weekly meetings with the lecturers were a good way of holding us accountable to working on stories and thinking of new ideas consistently through the term. I enjoyed interacting with the lecturers on a personal basis, and appreciated their constructive criticism of my work. The meetings also provided a fixed time for our news agencies to meet, which was very necessary, especially towards the end of the term when people were busy with plenty of work on their other subjects as well as Journalism.

The idea of dividing us into news agencies with separate beats allowed us to explore a range of aspects of the university, and allowed good practice in teamwork, a very necessary skill for the workplace. The target of producing five articles each was realistic, and allowed us to put in time and effort to ensure that the articles were of excellent quality. I also enjoyed the way that we were encouraged to have our articles published: this provided added incentive to produce the best quality journalism we could, gave our reporting a purpose beyond simply earning marks, helped us to access sources who may have been less willing to contribute to articles that would not be published, and helped us build our portfolios of published work. This will aid in any job applications we make.

That said, I think that there were a few weaknesses in the course design. The placing of the due date for portfolios in the middle of the examination period was for our benefit, I know, since many people had not managed to finish their work by the end of the term, but it did mean that some people left considerable amounts of work until the examination period, which negatively affected their studying. Even those who tried their best to finish their work during the term would have to collaborate with their news agencies close to the deadline to compile the portfolios, which would have interrupted their examination preparations.

This deadline pressure was exacerbated by some confusion as to what contents the portfolio should have. I must admit that in my case, much of that confusion was caused by not reading the course outline meticulously at the beginning of the term and following it throughout the course, and by not always reading email attachments I was sent. However, I feel there was a lack of communication on the lecturers' part as well: the issue of exactly what to include in these critical reflections was not discussed in class, and the fact that we needed to write individual critical reflections for each article we wrote was not included in the course outline. Where there was communication in class about blogging and other matters relating to the portfolios, this was useful. I found that particularly Sim Kyazze's communication by email was good, but that emails should be sent to the class at least two hours in advance of the lecture they refer to. I realise that as journalists, we should be checking our email regularly, but during the term, not everyone has time to check their email before every writing and editing lecture to see if there has been an e-mail announcement about it.

I also felt that the process of allocating beats to news agencies should have been handled better. In a sense it was some agencies' own fault that they chose such narrow beats that they battled to find articles dealing with them and relating to Rhodes. But I felt the whole process would have been more fair if reasonable news beats were decided on by the lecturers and randomly allocated to us. This would also push us to report more on topics outside our individual fields of interest. However, this may have defeated the purpose of trying to get us to look at the nature of news beats, and what beats would be suitable for covering Rhodes.

Our news agency was very happy with our beat of academics and research, and found no shortage of good articles to write about it. However, I feel that we did not work as closely as a team as we should have. Group work can be extremely time-consuming, so towards the beginning of the term we developed the pattern of having as few meetings as possible, and instead passing work from one person to the other. I feel this was a sensible method of working together, since all of us are busy people and we can usually work more efficiently in a sort of assembly line than trying to complete every task together in meetings. However, this did mean that we were largely independent of each other when it came to investigating and writing articles. We shared story ideas and names of possible sources with each other in our weekly meetings with the lecturers, but then pursued, wrote and marketed stories on our own. We could also have done more to update each other about our progress using the blog. I feel we should probably have done more articles together as a team, rather than separately, and enjoyed the co-operation we had on the one article three of us have written together. At the beginning of term we made a decision that I would subedit all the articles produced by the news agency, but it proved impractical to do this before the deadlines set by our individual publishers, so I ended up subediting all the work after it had been published, for the final portfolio. This whole experience has shown me that for any journalistic work as a group, the group has to decide exactly how labour should be divided and define each person's role, and then stick to those decisions unless they prove impractical. Much communication is needed to ensure this happens.

In class, I felt the opportunities we were given to practice what we were learning during lectures in class assignments was also helpful, since learning writing techniques in theory can mean very little until one can put them into practice. In certain cases, such as the opinion-writing exercise, the deadline was very tight, but this helped to develop our experience, since deadlines in the real world aren't much better. I enjoyed the surprise news quizzes, since I keep up to date with the latest news and so generally do well at these things. I think that remaining aware of both local and international news is essential for any journalist. However, I thought the time spent on those computer-based logic and general knowledge quizzes at the beginning of the term would have been better spent on teaching, since we were never informed about their purpose. I would guess that they were an opportunity to assess some skills and see what areas lectures needed to focus on, but they were never referred to again in class.

I found the introductory news agency vision and mission-casting assignment very helpful. At the time we were asked to do it, I was not too happy with the idea, since I do not enjoy writing reflective reports, but in retrospect, the information we gathered in that process and the decisions we made were invaluable for our later newswriting. The mission statement had a great influence in the story ideas I chose to pursue: most were about explaining how research and academic developments at Rhodes are valuable to those in the broader Eastern Cape community. The introductory civic mapping question in that assignment also helped us decide which sources and avenues we were going to use to find story ideas. While one of these avenues did not prove very fruitful, others were extremely helpful. This reflects one important lesson I learnt this term: that good newswriting requires good homework, both before you even search for story ideas and then as you prepare interviews. I think the responses I received in interviewing sources were dramatically better than they could have been because I had taken some time to research topics and develop informed questions before I attended interviews.
The final civic mapping project, which we completed at the end of the term, was an engaging way of collecting the information about the community we had studied and rounding off the term's newswriting. I have been fascinated for a long time at the way communities and geographic factors interact to create a unique sense of place in different areas, and the civic map gave us some way to express that interaction on paper. In the end, we devised it as a sort of wall-chart guide to good sources at Rhodes, but I can see that one can develop civic mapping far further than that, to get better insights into how a community functions.

The blogging component of the course was a good opportunity to express our personal thoughts about the course and newswriting in general, and to communicate with our news agencies. I am sorry that I only grasped the whole purpose of personal and news agency blogging for the course rather late in the term, but I hope I made up for it by expressing some insights on my personal blog as I was learning them.

On a Media Studies level, though, I learnt that a blog is not an ideal means of communication for facilitating fast, active teamwork. The problem is that team members only see a blog when they choose to log on to it, and if they are forgetful and do not look at the blog regularly, they can miss important meetings and announcements. Another problem is that at times, important information was included in comments, which are not shown on the blog home page, and so can go unnoticed. The latest trend in new media is to ensure that instead of having to search for information on the Internet, consumers can make information come to them through RSS feeds or mailing lists. Perhaps we should have taken that approach and given all team members an email subscription to the team blog.

The last component of the course's work was, of course, critical reflections. For the most part, I find these reflections rather annoying and time-consuming, but I see their usefulness in bringing together all that we have learnt over the past term and getting us to think about how we can improve our news production. Being more self-reflexive is definitely a good thing; it helps to improve my work and prevents me from becoming arrogant. Through looking at each of the articles and writing critical reflections on them, I can see how my writing has improved through the term: my attribution is now more naturally integrated into the text, and I use fewer clumsy, long-winded sentences. These critical reflections, including this piece, have allowed me to put what I have learnt by experience this term into writing, and I hope I will refer back to these lessons and draw on them throughout my journalistic career.

I think I get the point of the critical reflections now

I've spent most of the day finalising the portfolio again. It's very fortunate that I had such a suitable gap before the Journ exam on Thursday 14 June to do all this stuff in.

In the morning I wrote the long 1500-word critical reflection on the course. I was dreading it, because I don't usually enjoy writing this type of thing, but it went quickly, and I found I had plenty to say about the course, both ways in which it can be improved, and things I learnt from it. It was a great exercise to pull together what we've been learning.

Now I'm back to subbing articles and getting them in a uniform format for the portfolio. It's monotonous work, but I want this to look good, and feel the subediting will only improve everyone's marks. I'm also still planning to write a short groupwork report, outlining exactly how we co-operated on different articles. It'll be short, but it should help Sim and Adrienne when it comes to allocating marks.

I did a dumb thing this afternoon by scheduling an appointment for 11am on Monday when the portfolio is due at 12 noon. Oh well, I guess things will just have to be ready earlier; if I have everything sorted out by then, it shouldn't be too much hassle to file everything and put on the appropriate logos. I'm glad that things are moving and we'll hand in a quality product at the end of the day.

A day of Journ

Yes, today I spent the whole day working on my Journ. It was tough. It was ugly. But I think I'm getting somewhere. It's a pity we had to leave it so late, but honestly I don't think I could have made the time to do this lot during the term. And if this is how us W&E people feel, I can't imagine how bad it must have been for people in specialisations like Design and TV where the assignments come so much thicker and faster.

First thing this morning I sent off my water software piece to Grocott's. I'm pretty proud that I was able to explain all the technical details in it as well as I did, but feel I didn't quite get the "so what" factor right: explaining in the lead why this story is so important and interesting. And my first headline, "Rhodes scientists updating water management software" was rather lame. My latest idea is "Homegrown software helps manage water".

Then I wrote up my bit of the Size and Shape story. I enjoyed that: it's great to see so much research come together, and I think it's going to make a killer article when we're done. I ended up being allocated a lot to write, because I had done the most research into the topic, but that's OK. I'm excited about it. We tried to share the load of research equally, but the way it worked out, I just was allocated more sources who talked well about the subject.

Then I started with the mass of critical reflections. It was difficult to know exactly what to write. I tended to start each with a narrative style, telling about how we got story ideas and how I sourced each story, but ended with more traditional critical comments about what I could have done better. It's been good to look back at all the lessons I've learnt in the course. There've been plenty. I wish, though, that Sim had given us some extra info about what he wanted in these critical reflections. I'll ask him tomorrow.

So yes, it's been a tough day, but everything's finally pulling together and it's one day closer to when that portfolio will land with a thud on Sim's desk, and I can get back to studying!

Stuff for our Civic Map

Here's some of the things I thought about adding to our civic map. I thought I'd post them on the blog as well:

Stuff to add to Civic Mapping:
People:
Dean of Research: John Duncan (didn't ever speak to him, but he could be useful). His secretary, Ilona Visagie, was not terribly helpful. That's one avenue we tried that didn't work too well. Heather Davies-Coleman (Duncan's assistant) would probably be better. I know her.
Mark Hazell, manager of Grounds and Gardens, has a great personality and gives some excellent quotes. He knows me since I'm a friend of his daughter.
Janice Limson (Dept of Biochemistry, Microbiology and Biotechnology): very friendly and willing to comment.
Valerie Møller, Professor of Quality of Life Studies at Institute for Social and Economic Research was great, and very aware of what's going on in town. She reads her Grocott's religiously.
Denis Hughes at Institute for Water Research was also helpful. He's got a son in first year.
Larry Strelitz, acting Dean of Humanities, is a good person to ask about the Journ department and humanities in general, but he's too journalist-aware and very cagey.
George Euvrard, Dean of Education, on the other hand, was wonderful: very open in sharing his faculty's plans with me and inviting me to a faculty board meeting. He knew my Dad from high school, which helps.
Anton Vorster, Director of the Finance Division, was happy to answer my questions and to be e-mailed a follow-up question. He knew my uncle somewhere down the line, but that's a rather vague connection.

Places:
Pick 'n Pay (not a great place to do vox pops in town, but Checkers is worse)
Activate office (good for picking up story ideas and assignments, especially at editorial meetings)
Rhodes e-Research Repository online (for interesting research that can be reported on)

Interview with Education Dean

I interviewed George Euvrard, the dean of education, yesterday. He was extremely helpful and informative. What helped, of course, is that he knew my dad from his high school days. Amazing what help a little personal connection can be. It's something I must bear in mind for the civic mapping. In fact, during the interview, he kept on calling me by my dad's name by accident!

Anyway, Euvrard was very eager to explain the background behind his faculty's corner of the size and shape debate as much as possible, to make sure we didn't get the context wrong. So the information I got from him was rather interesting. It turns out that Naledi Pandor had a meeting with the education faculty last year, where she said she was impressed with Rhodes's quality of training and our throughput, so she wanted us to do more and take on more students.

He also was very transparent about the faculty's future plans for its size and shape. He outlined the whole plan to me as it stands, and invited me to the next faculty board meeting, where the issue would be discussed. It'll be after the deadline for our portfolios, but I may well go anyway, just to make sure the article is as up to date as possible when it gets published in Activate next term.

Another civic mapping issue I've been thinking about a lot lately has been access to the finance administrators. I asked for an interview with the Registrar: Finance, but he's on long leave until July. His secretary referred me to Sandra Stephenson at the Academic Planning office. I don't think she quite understood that I wanted to learn a bit more about the financial side of the size and shape debate in particular. I'm going back to her soon to ask for an interview with the director of the finance division, to talk with him about government funding of the university, and how expanding the university would affect the budget. I hope he'll be willing to talk with me.

We also discussed at our last news agency meeting what kind of students we should interview about the size and shape debate. Luke Reid made the valid point that first-years are quoted too often in Activate, so I've asked a PGCE student and a third-year for comment. That's another thing to note in civic mapping: how more senior students are generally more in tune with how the university works and so are more likely to offer good comment on matters like size and shape.

An interesting technique

I was reading through last Tuesday's Grocott's (May 22) today and particularly enjoyed one article, "Fly me to the fun" on page 6, about the recent Aviation Day/Fly-in. The story used the technique of telling the story from the point of view of a visitor to the airshow: in this case, a three-year-old boy.

I think the technique helped to capture the childlike wonder one can feel at events like this, and brought readers closer to the action on the airfield. Unfortunately, the technique wasn't executed perfectly, though, and by the end of the lead paragraph I was left wondering what "Jimbo jets" and heliqwaqwas" were, before realising they were poor attempts at writing down the kid's baby talk. It's easy for this kind of writing to get patronising, or to jump in and out of the participant's viewpoint in an erratic way that simply confuses the reader. But I was still impressed with the overall idea of telling the story from a participant's perspective, rather than the traditional "all-seeing journalist" approach.

Pilger on Palestine

I just read a very interesting opinion piece by John Pilger on the M&G website. It's available online at http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleid=309403&area=/insight/insight__international/. In it, Pilger argues that Israel is slowly trying to suffocate Palestine. I first noticed the article because it was written by Pilger, and it certainly lived up to the man's reputation.

His writing plays on the emotions, with a detailed description of what it's like to live in Palestine at the moment. Now, I'm a bit sceptical about all this emotionalism, but Pilger makes it work really well towards his argument. The other thing I noticed about the piece is that although it was commentary, it was backed up by plenty of facts and statistics. I was particularly impressed by what he dug up about Israel having previously supported Hamas to fragment the Palestinian liberation movement. This showed me how an opinion piece can be far more effective if a fair amount of hard evidence is given for the opinion.

Nevertheless, it is clearly an opinion piece: I think Pilger is rather one-sided in criticising the Israelis' intent to destroy Palestine, while accepting at face value what he hears about Hamas being ready to make moves that would effectively recognise Israel. Still, it's an excellent expression of his opinion and a persuasive argument for it.

Should have read my course outline sooner...

Yes, there's no excuse for it, I've missed half the point of personal blogging for the Writing and Editing course, and just bumbled along doing what I thought was right. If only I'd read that course outline properly from the beginning! Apologies, Sim.

I had no idea about the need to find examples of good journalism or to comment on civic mapping until I read the outline properly this afternoon. So, before I shower and jump into bed, here are a few thoughts:

Firstly, civic mapping sounds like a wonderful concept. I've always been intrigued at the way societies and spaces interact, and civic mapping sounds like a fun way to do that. I hope that as I learn more about it, I'd be able to comment more on it in this blog. I said at the beginning of the course how Rhodes is, academically at least, rather a hierarchical structure, with information generally flowing down the ranks. It looks something like this: Rhodes administration > academic staff > postgraduate students > undergraduate students > the broader Grahamstown community. The task of a journalist in this kind of world is to fetch information from the top layers, and take it down to the bottom layers, where people aren't always aware of what's going on at the top. At least that's my working hypothesis at present.

Then, while it doesn't exactly qualify as journalism, I'd like to rave about my favourite blog (other than the ones I contribute to, that is). It's www.godspolitics.org , an American site in which several bloggers speak on the connections between Christian faith and politics. It's very activist, trying to plot an alternative to the USA's Religious Right ideology in calling for a broadening of Christians' political agenda from issues like abortion and homosexuality to areas like immigration reform, pro-poor policies and opposing unjust wars. I find it often an insightful alternative commentary on the USA political scene.

I wrote in the Christians @ Rhodes blog (http://christiansatrhodes.wordpress.com) about a news-feature-cum-commentary post on www.godspolitics.org that covered the banning and later unbanning of student Christian societies at the States' Georgetown University. I thought the article was a fairly good treatment of an event and issue that spanned some time, providing plenty of background to readers like me who were unaware of the event at the beginning. But more than that, I found it thought-provoking, like good journalism should be. It encouraged me to draw links between the Georgetown situation and life here at Rhodes. The article's online at http://www.beliefnet.com/blogs/godspolitics/2007/05/nancy-chan-exiled-ministries-return-to.html .

Water Modelling Software

Yesterday I interviewed Prof Hughes from IWR about the institute's software for modelling supply of water resources. It'll be difficult stuff to explain in an article, because all that the software does is geared very much at specialists, but I think it's interesting and really does have an impact on how our water resources are managed. The national department of water affairs and forestry even uses the software.

At the moment, a second version of the software is being written by some people at UKZN in co-operation with Prof Hughes and David Forsyth at IWR. I've sent an email to the leader of the project at UKZN and to a user of the software in Sri Lanka, so I should have some good info for the story. I'm thinking of sending it either to Grocott's or the Daily Dispatch. So things are looking fairly good on that front.

I'm thinking of making it a longer news story, with the writing of the second version as a news hook, then explaining exactly what the software does and who uses it in paragraphs further down.

My "There's no story" day

Sigh... Today I found out that two stories I was interested in weren't going to work out. I suspected that my Rooibos story was going to fall through because yesterday the Prof I wanted to interview about it told me that he had played only a minor role in the research on the rooibos-growing projects. That meant I had very little to hook a story onto, remaining within the confines of our beat.

Nevertheless, I went through and interviewed him this morning. It was interesting, of course, but he doesn't know enough about other Fairtrade projects in SA or about the way Fairtrade works in general to do a story on either one of those angles. I could have done a story on one of the rooibos-growing projects, but like I said in my last blog entry, it wouldn't be a great story since I can't go out to the West Coast and interview the farmers personally. They probably don't even have a contact number of their own, from what the prof tells me. So, that's one story on the backburner.

Then last night I'd also told the Activate people last night I'd do an article for them on some students who've come back from an exchange programme and are battling with one department to get credits awarded to them for it. I followed it up and the people involved didn't want to have any comments published about it, since it might jeopardise their standing with the department involved. I enquired about others who might have similar problems, and came to a dead end there too. Sigh.

But I've got another really interesting idea I'm working on at the moment. The Politics department is running a seminar on Friday at lunchtime on China's involvement with Zimbabwe, which sounds like it could be intriguing. Now, as long as it isn't cancelled because a rape awareness march is happening at the same time... - Ian

Rooibos Tea and Fair Trade

I've just read a journal article by Etienne Nel from the Rhodes Geography department on how two isolated rural communities near the West Coast have made money by exporting rooibos tea to Northern countries through the Fairtrade network. It's very exciting stuff, and I'm throwing around a few angles I can take on the story.

It doesn't make too much sense to do an article solely on the West Coast rooibos-growers, since, well, I'm here and they're over 1 000km away by road. I could ask Nel how much he knows about other Fairtrade agricultural projects, and do a general feature on Fairtrade agricultural projects in SA, or even do a "How fair is Fairtrade?" angle looking at the benefits of selling to Fairtrade organisations versus the administrative costs, extra paperwork and tight constraints it brings.I think I could sell a feature on this to Daily Dispatch.

It's the type of story M&G might love, but they're also likely to have heard it all before. So I'll see where this goes. - Ian

Vox-popping in town...and other adventures

Jonathan Ancer asked me to write both a hard news story on the quality of life survey that ISER's planning for Grahamstown East, and a feature on Prof Valerie Moller's opinions about quality of life in Grahamstown. I suggested both these angles, and in my naivety suggested that I could do vox-pops in town to see whether people agreed with Moller's opinions for the feature story. Bad move.

I tootled off to Pick 'n Pay pretty confidently on Tuesday afternoon to start taking vox-pops. I had decided that I'd ask people how long they'd been in Grahamstown, and then whether they felt quality of life in Grahamstown had changed for better or worse during that time or since 1994, whichever was shortest. The whole point of doing the vox-pops in town was, of course, to get the opinions of regular townspeople, rather than students.

As Murphy's law would have it, the first person I meet on New Street would happen to be a close friend of mine. And he would ask me what I was doing, and I would feel obliged to interview him. Still, I thought that was fine. Students are a part of this town, after all.I walked further along and found a man standing around at the corner of Peppergrove's Allen Street exit. He gave me a great answer, and I felt like I was getting somewhere. Then I get into Peppergrove and decide to do my shopping before carrying on with the vox-pops.

I took one look at the people coming in and out of Pick 'n Pay, and another look at the Hi-Tec security guards hanging around, looking like they wouldn't appreciate me standing there interviewing randoms, and headed out of Peppergrove. I met a beggar in the road, flipped him a couple of coins and asked his opinion. It was good. I then walked on to the entrance of Checkers, asking a few people on my way for their opinions, but they're all rushing home from work, and so don't have time for a friendly reporter.

When I get to Checkers, I stand in the doorway for a while, but everyone's moving too fast for me to get a word in edgeways. Then I get sidetracked by a half-blind, drunk beggar who thinks I'm God. He twists my arm into buying him bread and amasi. Memo to myself: Never bring money with you when you do vox-pops in town. And never try doing it in the entrance to Checkers. I pray with the man, make some attempt at a theological discussion with him, then beat a hasty retreat, unnerved. He'll keep on bugging me if I stand around Checkers, and anyway, it's 5:30pm by now, so there aren't too many people around. All I have to show for my hour-long vox-popping section is four interviews: two of students, and two of black males. Not exactly what you'd call good demographics.

I came back to give another stab at it this morning. First target was a bead-seller under the arch. She couldn't speak English. Right, I'll just move on. I make my way to Peppergrove, garnering another interview as I go. There I lurk in the doorway to Pick 'n Pay (which is now mercifully clear of security guards), ready to pounce on all those soccer moms coming to do their groceries while the kids are at school. As any American politician will tell you, the soccer mom is the holy grail demographic. Once you've got her on your side, you can do anything. And anything is precisely what I do: I even load a little old lady's groceries into her boot so I can interview her, and speak to the grumpy old man waiting for his wife in the car next door.

Eventually I have my target of ten complete vox-pops with requisite variation in gender, age and race. It's taken me about two hours. It was quite an experience, but it's under my belt now. But next time I vox-pop in town, I don't think I'll be nearly as selective about my demographics, or quite as shy to pounce on people and ask them for a comment. - Ian