Idea Lab

Using Text Messages to Combat Identity Theft in South Africa

by Guy Berger
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Information access is on the move in Africa. Let me paint you a picture. The person is fictitious, but the process isn't. Patience Ndlovu, a 24-year-old woman living in Soweto, South Africa, sends an SMS to a cell phone number she has scribbled on a scrap of paper. Her text reads "L," followed by her ID number, and the destination number for the message is 32551. She got these details from a friend who in turn learned about it from a discarded newspaper that she picked up on a bus the week before. The phone beeps. Ndlovu clicks a...

• February 10, 2010
• comment

Mobile Phones Give Africans a Voice, Make Governments Nervous

by Guy Berger
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

User-generated comments, and text messages in particular, are causing umbrage in Namibian government circles. Their unhappiness highlights the historic shift of media away from unidirectional, univocal information. This case underlines the politics entailed when the media becomes a platform for broader communication, which is exactly what's happening with mobile phones in some African countries. Things came to a head in Namibia in early October at a political rally held as part of the build-up to the country's November elections. A torrent of abuse and threats were issued at the event, and they emanated from the Namibian minister of justice,...

• October 13, 2009
• comment

Journalism Teachers Get Mobile-ized in South Africa

by Guy Berger
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Most Africans don't have computers or access to the Internet. Cell phones are a different story. So why aren't journalism schools around the continent integrating the use of mobile devices fully and squarely into their courses? It's a question that could also apply in many other places -- even in places with access to computers and the Internet. Answers to this challenge were provided in Grahamstown, South Africa last week, when MobileActive's Katrin Verclas, a Knight grantee, ran a workshop with a selection of African journalism teachers at Rhodes University. Participants were brought together under the auspices of another...

• September 21, 2009
• comments

Two Recent J-Education Conferences Show Resistance to Change

by Guy Berger
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

There's no intrinsic reason why organized journalism education shouldn't lead -- rather than merely reflect -- what's happening in the world of communications. Yet this passive "mirror" status cries out for transformation. Of course, not everyone sees J-schools as reflective entities. For years, editors worldwide have complained that the schools don't in fact reflect the mainstream media enough. J-teachers are blamed for a shoddy supply of new cogs to the newsroom machines. The industry's assumption has been that it knows exactly what's needed; that it's the J-schools that need changing. Educational institutions, in this view, should be service providers to...

• August 15, 2009
• comments

No Newspaper Bailouts without Civic Representation

by Guy Berger
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Government money to bail out newspapers is a rather "un-American" suggestion. It has been put forward by various commentators who feel that emergency circumstances call for drastic measures. After all, it's not just jobs at stake, but the survival of a key pillar of democracy. If newspapers go under, the argument goes, so too does the bulk of professional journalism. The same proposal has been roundly condemned by people whose knee-jerk reaction is that government money means government control. For this camp, government control engenders the oxymoron of "government journalism." Ergo, a bailout is not a solution for saving an...

• July 23, 2009
• comments

Reports of Journalism's Death Are Greatly Exaggerated

by Guy Berger
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Spare a thought for journalists these days, the folk feeling particularly unappreciated as they face a barrage of public scorn on the one hand and panic-stricken managements pushing for cuts in salaries, rises in productivity, and even retrenchments, on the other. They don't want your pity. They're seeking your respect -- and your helpful answers to some of their questions about the future. Journalists under siege For sure, professional reporters are not saints deserving of hero-worship. But they don't deserve to be dubbed a closed priesthood interested only in preaching to the masses and keeping lay-people out of the profession....

• June 25, 2009
• comment

Singing the Praises of 'Strategic Journalism'

by Guy Berger
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

With all the talk of how newspapers can retain readers, it's still worth remembering some useful advice to newspapers from more than ten years ago. It comes from Mike Smith, at that time the assistant director of the Newspaper Management Center at Northwestern University. In a publication titled Values. Culture.Content, he addressed the question, "How do you differentiate your product from the growing number of media and information options?" Observing that "newspapers are place-based media," he went on to note that the standard answer was that newspapers should "become the primary source of local news." Rebutting this, Smith declared that...

• May 26, 2009
• comments

Digital Migration For a Small-Town Paper in South Africa

by Guy Berger
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

No, this article is not about broadcasters shifting to digital transmission. But it's about something that's also a huge change -- uprooting from known territory and heading for the unknown complexities of digital country. Switch-over in the sense of convergence is the challenge facing South African community paper Grocott's Mail. The publication is at the heart of a Knight Foundation project to exploit new technologies in order to build a participative public sphere within a small town. The paper serves a town that's divided spatially, linguistically, racially, and along class lines. There are also divisions between youth and adults, and...

• February 19, 2009
• comments

Strategizing Media Software Development: Some Lessons Learned

by Guy Berger
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Here's a story showing the extent of complications in getting a system going, so I'll tell it simply. It's my non-geek experience of work for a community newspaper that aims to produce world-class code for community papers that is singing-dancing, super-portable and open-source. The history started in the buzz around the World Summit on Information Society which helped to move OSS into the mental horizon of non-techies like me. When the Rhodes journalism school where I work acquired Grocott's Mail, the local newspaper in 2004, we had to install a load of new PCs to accommodate students who would now...

• February 5, 2009
• comments

Iindaba Ziyafika: The News Is Coming

by Guy Berger
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

The news has started to flow. It's a trial-trickle from township teenagers, through to other social groupings in Grahamstown. With the kick-off of phase one during 2008, citizen youth content has crossed the chasm of age difference to reach the older readers of the Grocott's Mail newspaper. This is an early manifestation of the Knight Challenge project titled Iindaba Ziyafika, which aims to use cellphone technology to deepen a local public sphere in which Grocott's Mail is the primary place for a meeting of minds and formulation of public opinion. It's not just age differences being spanned, but a legacy...

• December 11, 2008
• comments

Getting Closer to SMS Journalism

by Guy Berger
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

In August, we start some initial workshops with high school learners, to discuss with them what it takes to be "citizen journalists" - contributing content that the mainstream will publish. What's more, the content is constrained by being 140 characters long - sms is the method of communications for now. Over the course of 8 workshops, 80 learners in their penultimate school year will be trained about optimum Cit-journ in this way ... all over two months. The workshops, to be run by university journalism students and co-ordinated by colleage Sipho January, will cover the skills of contributing opinions, news...

• July 10, 2008
• comments

The Sites in their Sights

by Guy Berger
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

So which are the regular websites visited by the big names at the MIT Center for Future Civic Media conference? I asked people like Jay Rosen, JD Lasica, Amy Gahran, Paul Grabowicz, Henry Jenkins and others to share their favorites. Surveying ten or so folks shows that top of the list is Jeff Jarvis' BuzzMachine. It's followed closely by Amy Gahran's E-Media Tidbits and Jay Rosen's Pressthink. Dan Gilmor, Romanesko and Mark Glaser's MediaShift are also popular online destinations. Also mentioned were: Paidcontent.org ReadWriteWeb Dave Winer's Scripting News Doc Searles Steve Outing JD Lasica's Social Media Online Journalism Review Cyberjournalist.net...

• June 13, 2008
• comment

Twittering from the Future of Civic Media Meeting

by Guy Berger
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Opening panel at the conference is talking from local media (as civic media), ranging to macro political level. Tweeting the debates....

• June 11, 2008
• comments

African Cell-Phone Media: Hostage to Policy Delays

by Guy Berger
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

There are a couple of delays in implementing our Iindaba Ziyafika - the news is coming project around cellphone journalism, supported by the Knight Foundation - but the tardy policy context in South Africa is also a constraint. At present in South Africa, at least six out of ten adults have access to cellphones, but their main use is for interpersonal conversation. The notion that these are devices that can also be used to receive, and contribute to, journalism is not well-developed beyond sms comments sent to the mass media. What could begin to change this culture is free-to-air television...

• June 11, 2008
• comments