Last year, we launched Grahamstown Now, a mobile site that offers Grahamstown residents a wealth of reporting and information about what's currently on the go, or coming up soon, among other details. Local event listings, business specials, news from Grocott's Online, current weather conditions, views from various local webcams, ride offers/requests, local radio and cinema schedules and a Grahamstown Guide (a directory for the town) are all on offer.

In a small South African town where mobile phone penetration far outweighs that of Internet connectivity, the service is rapidly gaining users, as I reported here.

New Version

As with all software projects, we rely on constant feedback to guide improvements. In February 2011, we launched a new version with a critically important new user management system. Local businesses can now manage their profiles and listings. We have added maps and enhanced the integration of Facebook and Twitter. Right now we're busy adding a MobiStory feature (for citizen journalism contributions) and developing a comprehensive customized alerts system. We've also revamped the branding.

Content on Grahamstown Now, particularly events and business specials, is now prioritized by imminence. This is critical to both the business model and the journalism model and, hopefully, to the two of them working in an ever more virtuous interaction, leading to financial sustainability. Take a look at the site at any given time and you might see that a 2-for-1 pizza special is on right now (and ends in three hours), or that a public workshop on a civic issue is starting in 30 minutes.

Grahamstown Now has three main objectives: become financially self-sustainable, improve community life through better access to core information and good journalism, and become a replicable model that can be used by other community media outlets in Africa. To share more about how we're doing this, I spoke with Michael Salzwedel, the driving force behind Grahamstown Now and the online editor at Grocott's Mail, about the project's strategy and success in each of these areas.

Q&A

Q: Michael, great code only goes so far. African media is, like their counterparts globally, being battered by the ongoing recession. How will Grahamstown Now become financially viable? What is the business model?

A: Our premise here was that almost everyone in Grahamstown would like to know about how they can save money in Grahamstown -- or anywhere else. This is poor town, and with world food prices rising so fast, this is a critical area even for people who have a reasonable income. So, we set out to become an aggregator of local business specials, charging businesses to list their specials, and providing the information about specials free to our users. So far we've partnered with 28 local businesses, with more on the way as we grow. We've signed up over 600 individual users since the user registration system went live in early February this year.

Q: So you don't charge users anything?

A: No. We examined that model, and we had a plan to charge users just a few cents a day, but we've reverted back to what I guess is a more traditional advertising model. But because we want and need business to come to the party with really good "loss-leading" specials, offers that will get customers, our users, to their stores, especially for about-to-expire fresh goods, we keep the costs low for businesses.

Q: What kind of specials are you looking for?

A:  We encourage businesses to come up with specials that are valid for narrow windows [in order to] to enhance the sense of urgency and to fit in with Grahamstown Now's time-focused nature. We're looking into refining this model to focus more on exclusive specials and deeper discounts, incorporating a Groupon-like approach, thereby offering much deeper value to users. It is hard for business to get their heads around this. Merchants are comfortable with offering a 10 percent discount, but that doesn't light up the mobile space or get everyone talking. A short-lived window, say an hour or two, where you can get 50 percent discount on fresh food, or everyday conveniences, something that people talk about, that has a bit of "wow" factor, are what we are after now.

Q: Isn't that a very risky approach? What if you don't get these kinds of specials?

A: It is taking a lot of work because it is about behavior change. No one has tried this kind of Groupon, high-value discount, short-time-of-offer model before, that we know of, in Africa. (And if anyone has or is, please get in contact with us!)  But you have to work with each business, big and small, to custom-make offers. You have to be creative, thinking about 2-for-1 specials, free coffees with that burger, higher end specials for richer users, and deep discounts on basics for the less well-off. Merchants are not exposed to what many of them fear -- a huge rush of thousands of people to get the 50 percent off on, say, potatoes -- because that deal might only be offered for an hour. But you generate buzz and even if people do respond in large numbers, that should be great, as you'll hopefully sell more than just that discounted bag of potatoes when they are actually in your store.

Q: How do users know there is a great special -- that might only be live for an hour -- happening?

A: We're working hard to beef up our customized alerts so that users can be notified immediately via email, SMS or IM whenever a new special in their preferred category or from their selected businesses is listed or is about to start. Alerts are also great to notify users about new events listed by organizations in our Grahamstown Guide that the user has expressed an interest in, for example.

Q: How's that going?

A: It is still early and each business is a sit-down discussion, loads of follow-up, but hopefully others will get on board at lower acquisition cost to us as the word spreads and we start generating success stories. We're hoping that a combination of exclusive, high-value specials and associated personalized, just-in-time alerts, will take Grahamstown Now from doing alright to doing great as far as revenue is concerned. Pushing relevant information to users, rather than having them pull it from us by arbitrarily visiting the site, should make a big difference.

Q: Grahamstown Now is also about trying to improve public participation and opportunities for community problem-solving. How does that feature on Grahamstown Now?

A: A broad aim of our Iindaba Ziyafika project (of which Grahamstown Now is a part) is to connect people to each other and to local power elites, by providing accessible platforms that open up the flows of information between ordinary community members and, ideally, the people who can -- and need to be pressured to -- make change happen, which are the guys who run the local municipality, both politicians and officials.

We took a hard decision to make Grahamstown Now accessible by even the most basic of internet-enabled cellphones, so that we have the potential to reach, inform and empower a large proportion of Grahmstown's population. The idea is to let community members know more about what's going on in Grahamstown (not just business specials), and thus make more informed decisions.

Q: What kind of information and journalism does the site offer to do that?

A: We're adding a comprehensive section for the local government elections coming up in May, which will inform people about their wards, their counselors, their polling stations, etc., and, crucially, let them voice and discuss their concerns relating to electoral matters. Tie this in with customized notifications (you can get SMSed when the counselor for your ward is mentioned in the news, for example), and you're onto something quite powerful and empowering, we believe. We're partnering with a local NGO to use Grahamstown Now as the platform to capture and visualize data relating to the efficiency and effectiveness of local governance service provision, which will involve community remembers reporting, using their phones, on the quality of the current services that they are receiving.

Q: You've got Rhodes University as the biggest contributor to local GDP in Grahamstown -- probably half the town's economy revolves around it -- how are you working with them?

A: We've also begun working with Rhodes University to set up a centralized digital presence (on Grahamstown Now) for all community engagement organizations and projects in Grahamstown. Grahamstown Now users will be able to be notified whenever an event or project has been planned for their specific hyper local community or for their specific interests, and easily communicate with the organizers. This is handy for ensuring full attendance at free skills workshops, for example. And for term times, for about 30 weeks a year here, there are 7,000 plus students in the town, and these have to be a vital part of Grahamstown Now's success.

Q: Part of your mandate is to create something that others in Africa can use. But the software, although open source and free, does need good tech skills to install and use, and the business model does require, it seems, spending a lot of time getting merchants, and service providers to think beyond column inches and mere advertising. Is NIKA and Grahamstown Now a  replicable model?

A: Ultimately we want Grahamstown Now to work seamlessly with NIKA to enable other publishers to easily publish to print, web and mobile from one place. We acknowledge that we need to simplify the requirements for setting up data sources that do not come from within a newspaper -- we're lucky to have the oldest newspaper in South Africa, which comes out twice a week, as a big source for our journalism.

Q: So you don't have to be an existing community newspaper to give this model a go?

A: No. The idea is that any community media group, or aspiring group, even if they don't have their own existing paper, will be able to install NIKA and their own customized instance of the Now software and, with minimal technical complications, be ready to reach cellphone users with all, or most, of the features and functionality of Grahamstown Now. 

We're strongly considering an in the cloud solution to achieve this, which would take away the need for individual in-house installation, and replace that with a web-based service. Of course, getting local business in on the loop is up to the users: a deep-discount business strategy can work, but as Groupon and others around the world have found, you have to turn local businesses on to the opportunities this kind of approach can offer!

Perhaps all of them made something of a difference to someone. That's one of the great things about journalism -- you never know!

What these stories have in common is they were all reported and written by citizen journalists, all of whom have a little bit of training, via the Knight-funded Iindaba Ziyafika project. Almost without exception, these stories are about issues that Grocott's Mail, the local paper that is also South Africa's oldest independent newspaper, would not have been able to cover due to meager resources. (Like so many other community papers around the world.) Many of the stories have also been facilitated in various ways by mobile phones, even if it is mostly via straightforward use of the phones to call sources to get and check information.

Among the stories is one that reported about plans to close a particularly poorly performing school in Grahamstown, and reports about protests by poor residents due to the lack of basic services such as water and electricity.

There's also a report about an automobile accident and a story about rising student use of flavored tobaccos through Hookah-like instruments, written, in this case by a student journalist.

A Town Talking to Itself

Since August, many of these stories have also been discussed on our new community radio show, Lunchtime Live. We've always believed that radio and print are a very powerful combination in a small town, creating simultaneous depth and immediacy, and allowing for real participation and debate. Stories can be broken on radio, or via our SMS line, given greater nuance in print, and deeper airings on phone-in debates.

This all requires a great deal of coordination and management, but the results are worth it. Part of the focus of the Iindaba Ziyafika project is to get a town "talking to itself," and to open up information streams and public debate about issues that really matter. Radio is a great medium for this, but to take a story to the air, whether before or after it appears in print, still means it has to be well researched, fact-checked and fair. As I mentioned in my previous post, human interest stories generate a lot of interaction, but our recent (November) discussion of a hot new/old topic -- changing Grahamstown's name -- brought us stellar audiences via an overtly political issue.

Name change was one of the original issues that formed part of our proposal to the Knight Foundation in 2008. Throughout South Africa, a fraught and fascinating process is taking place that entails the "decolonizing" of names of places, airports, rivers, and of course towns and cities. For example, our nearby apartheid era institution, the "University of Port of Elizabeth" is now called "Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University"; Johannesburg's "Jan Smuts Airport" (named after pre-apartheid Prime Minister Jan Smuts) has been renamed "O.R. Tambo International Airport" after the man who served as president of the ANC while Nelson Mandela was in prison for 27 years.

These processes can generate intense debate. Grahamstown is named after its founder, Colonel Graham. He was in charge of a strategy, outlined by his commander John Cradock (which our neighboring town is named after), to ensure that enough violence was used against local people to "impress on the minds of these savages a proper degree of terror and respect."

Over 100 years, the indigenous iziXhosa people fought nine wars with white colonial settlers and Colonel Graham stood out as one of the most effective colonizing soldiers.

As Guy Berger has written, plans to change the name back to the original "iRhini" -- which is thought to derive from characterizing the town as "the place of reeds" -- has "evoked massive resistance from white residents, many of whom are descendants of British settlers who began arriving in numbers in 1820, and whose business interests are often linked to the brand of 'Grahamstown.'" (That passage is from Berger's paper, "Empowering Citizen Journalists: A South African Case Study." It was presented at the AEJMC conference in Denver last August).

Many people have argued that local government in South Africa is using "symbolic issues" merely as a way of distracting voters from a poor record of delivery. Changing names is an expensive process, no doubt, and many question the priority of name changes in the face of so much social need.

Late in 2010, the name change once again became a big issue in Grahamstown, and Iindaba Ziyafika arranged what turned out to be an excellent on-air and in paper/web discussion of the name change debate. Iindaba Ziyafika has helped the local community radio station, Radio Grahamstown, get back on its feet precisely so such debates can take place. Listen to the debate here. It's a complex issue, and there are strongly held views on both sides.

Local Elections

2011 is going to be a big year for South Africa -- although not as big as hosting the World Cup in 2010! -- because we have local government elections where local town councils and mayors are chosen. These are highly contested every five years, often with a dozen candidates standing for a single ward seat. Although the dominant ruling party, the ANC, won two-thirds of the national vote in the 2006 municipal government elections, results vary dramatically from town to town. Many independent candidates, who are not formally aligned to any political party, run for election, so final results are never easy to predict.

It is at these elections that the kind of mobile/radio/website/newspaper "broaden the public sphere" project like ours can really earn its stripes. As this is the final year of our three-year Knight grant, we now have the platforms to inspire greater levels of participation in the election -- possibly more so than any small town in South Africa.

We'll soon be conducting a large public opinion survey of our various mobile-centric platforms to see what is known about them, how they are used, and how we can make them work better. It is our aim to use the Iindaba Ziyafika platforms to get Grahamstown debating issues across class, race and gender divides and, hopefully, electing representatives who respect the more engaged citizenry we are helping to create.

Iindaba Ziyafika, our Knight News Challenge project in South Africa, has focused a great deal on training citizen journalists for print and digital media. The project is now branching out even more into community radio. We formalized a partnership with Radio Grahamstown, the local community radio station, to create about five hours of programming each week and to help the station stabilize itself. In South Africa, community media is poorly supported by government (if at all), and are often survivalist and marginal enterprises run by dedicated but stretched volunteers.

Our youth program, Y4Y, is going strong after eight months. It's produced by and for young people from Grahamstown's 13 high schools. The show builds bridges across the huge gulfs of race and class that permeate life in South Africa -- and it's developing a loyal listenership.

What is particularly exciting about the show is the way young people are able to use low cost instant messaging to interact with the show, rather than the more expensive SMS method used at commercial stations. An SMS in South Africa can cost the equivalent of 10 U.S. cents -- a lot of money where 40 percent of citizens live on less than U.S. $2 a day. By contrast, an IM costs 1/80th the cost of an SMS.

Reaching Adults

More recently, Iindaba Ziyafika has moved towards building a more adult audience, but with similar ambitions and strategies to build bridges and cross barriers. We created a new news-focused show called Lunchtime Live. Initially on twice a week for an hour, the idea is to one day go live every weekday for an hour.

Lunchtime Live is a wonderful hybrid of citizen journalism, live interviews, call-in talk radio (and sent-in SMSs and IMs from cell phones) combined with professional interviewing and radio production.

Building on the Izwi Labahlali (The Voice Of The Citizens) pilots of 2009, citizen journalists prepare stories, come on air to read their copy, and the stories are then discussed with well prepared hosts. Often, pre-production have arranged to call the people mentioned in the in the stories, especially when a contentious issue is raised.

The citizen journalist then gets to take part in a moderated discussion with the people about whom he/she has written, or who might have something valuable to contribute

Sometimes the show is a bit similar to Sourcing Through Texting, which was recently written about on Idea Lab. That show sees listeners text in a story tip, but more often the stories are sourced by citizen journalists. Our citizen journalists have 20 hours of training to guide them, and a lot of mentoring from a citizen journalism editor. Some of them have become community "super stringers," or what we might have, in a different age, called "freelance journalists." It helps that we pay -- or should we rather say cover costs! -- for good journalism!

Strikes and Human Interest

Topics for coverage vary. We've had a lot of strikes in South Africa recently, some nationwide, and some very local. Our citizen journalists broke the news of strikes starting locally, one at Kentucky Fried Chicken, and a teachers strike. During the strike, radio turned out to be the best way to follow the fast moving strikes, marches, and sit-ins. The citizen journalists (and the production crew) worked hard to let different voices, such as parents and pupils whose schools were closed by the strike, striking workers, and management have their say. The KFC strike was a big deal in our home town, but not as big as the national public sector strike that shut down courts, schools, hospitals and the like across South Africa.

On other levels, human interest stories also generate a lot of discussion, calls, IMs and SMS. A poor family called to say their daughter had died in Johannesburg, but they could not afford the exorbitant cost of transporting her body back to Grahamtown (a journey of about 1000 kilometers). After the story appeared on Lunchtime Life (and later as an article in print and online), money and offers to help came pouring in, and the grieving family was able to bury their loved one this past weekend.

Radio really does have power to connect people to each other, helping rebuild social capital and social solidarity in the process.

Our print-based citizen journalism is going from strength to strength, with over a dozen articles appearing each month; but the articles are written to conform with the fairly traditional norms of the newspaper -- and they are only in English. On Lunchtime Live, isiXhosa, one of the official languages of South Africa, and English can mix freely. This frees people to phone in and speak in the language they prefer.

Indeed, when we talk about "public spheres" there is a lot tied into "'formal" ways of engaging. Amidst the hustle and bustle of South Africa, a country still struggling to overcome a past of exclusion based on race, gender and language, community radio has a critical role to play in deepening democracy. Lunchtime Live is finding out, in big and small ways, how that role might be played.

Speakers from the U.S. included John Nichols, Washington correspondent of The Nation, and the author of some of the best books on U.S. journalism; Jay Rosen, a leading thinker about public and participatory journalism from New York University, was also on the conference bill.

It has been interesting to hear that some folk in Australia are launching a site that's based on the Knight Foundation-funded Spot.us' model (and code). It's great to see Knight-funded innovation diffusing all over the place.

I spoke about our Knight-funded Iindaba Ziyafika project, but also about broader issues dealing with media, journalism, citizen journalism and digital business models in Africa. (It was a panel, so there were questions that led in lots of directions!). I looked in particular at citizen journalism as a concept, and shared something of what we're trying to achieve. Below is the text that I prepared in advance of the panel, and which was first published in the conference issue of Walkley Magazine.

Remarks on Citizen Journalism

Can democracy work and good government happen without local media?"

The two are not the same thing of course. Authoritarian governments can get the trains to run on time, and tip-top democracies can still have badly run departments, councils or even whole ministries at a national level. A double whammy is to have both low levels of democratic participation (even though people might vote once every five years), and poor government services. In many parts of South Africa, we have both whammies. Does and can local media, or "community" media, make a difference? And if it does, how does it do that?

Our general experience in South Africa is that community media does make some difference, if only to make graft, corruption and inefficiency slightly more likely to be exposed and, we like to think, therefore slightly less likely to occur. Studies that provide hard evidence for this are thin on the ground, but there are some, and they do suggest reasons for optimism in this regard.

A more specific example, of Grahamstown, our fairly representative of the rest of South Africa city of 100,000 people, reinforces this "gut feel" that good local journalism can play both watchdog and more proactive, get-people-involved roles. In Grahamstown, we enjoy a twice-a-week community newspaper that has been publishing for 140 year, Grocott's Mail. Anecdotally at least, many believe the reasonable performance of our local council and police -- when compared on national comparative charts that are published periodically by government agencies -- might have something to do with the greater volume of decent press coverage from Grocott's Mail.

But how can local media achieve greater volumes of credible journalism that is good enough to make a difference? To be commercially viable, or even to stay open, most community papers (and of course even most commercial papers) run on razor thin staff complements. It is hard to get one reporter to a council meeting, let alone cover all the sub-committees, for example.

The Role of Citizen Journalism

That's where citizen journalism can possibly play a huge role. With Iindaba Ziyafika ("the news is coming") our approach to citizen journalism is, firstly, to get clear about what we mean. The term "citizen journalism" has always been controversial because of the slippage between the meanings often intended by the users of co-joined term, and the meanings usually ascribed to both constituent words when used on their own. We take the view that journalism, citizen or otherwise, has to adhere to some of the norms of a rather "liberal" conventions of short-form news journalism, which are fairly standard, if aspirational at the edges, in most democracies.

This means that citizen journalists have learned that stories need to be "told" (so a short narrative needs to be constructed), and that the story needs to give as full a picture as possible about the subject matter, and still be as "fair" and "balanced" as it can be.
Fullness, or at least adequate context, comes from a focus on the basics of the "who, what, where, when, how" classic news formulation, and fairness stems, in part, from openness of motive (being clear about why you, the writer, or the paper, or both, are running the story), balance (not just covering the bad stuff) multiple sourcing ("one source is no source" is one of our mantras) and affording a clear right of reply.

None of these are easy to do, or to inculcate, but getting it mostly right means you have a much better chance of creating the kind of stories that readers are more likely to trust and act on.

Achieving this is not straightforward or easy. In our experience, papers that want to do this need to provide a fair amount of training and, harder still, need to seed something of a "community of practice." (This concept, coined by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, suggests that ongoing learning takes place best in groups where new knowledge and approaches can be easily shared, and where the sense of belonging to a group is a critical spur to a sense of identity, the development of which is the key to mastery in any profession).

Training Citizen Journalists

Our approach revolves around offering about 20 hours of training over six week, which is carefully sequenced. Our training focuses first on story selection -- what is important, what is happening, what can be changed.

Then we spend a lot of time on finding sources and interviewing skills. Many trainees are amazed that their people who's job it is to talk to the media, and that they will talk to our citizen journalists, especially if they develop some credibility with those sources.

Then we talk and explore how to achieve balance and fairness, but also going just that bit further than "standard," "objective" commercial media pieces, to working out ways to create more "empowering" and "solution orientated" stories. We want our writers to not just write about what is wrong, but to ask and explore how is it to be fixed. Better still, follow up, and follow up some more, something many papers have become poor at, until something happens!

Post training, we now also provide a dedicated citizen journalism editor and we encourage the most promising citizen journalists from each course (about 30 people complete each course, which are run over six weeks) to attend diary meetings. We've also created our own citizen journalism diary meetings. And, we pay for published articles and photos. It is a very modest amount, R100 for a published article, but in a town where more than one in two people are unemployed (and youth under 30, unemployment is two out of three), this can and is becoming a useful way to get some additional income.

Of course, a lot of people -- when hearing about our approaches -- throw their hands up and say, "Ok, wait a second, your so-called citizen journalists are trained, there is post training mentoring, their copy is edited and fact checked, stories are paid for, and you even encourage them to join diary meetings with all the pros -- how is this not just journalism en masse, rather than citizen journalism?"

Holistic Approach Works

And if they are producing good stories, that make some difference, how is this not just a
way of generating copy cheaper, i.e. how is this not exploitative? (And when the Knight Foundation grant is gone, how could you, or any other grantless paper, afford to give volunteers 20 hours of training, payment for stories and photos, and a sense of belonging to a group of people with an emerging quasi-professional identity. Yes, we give our citizen journalists press cards!)

These are all good questions, but these citizen journalists remain dedicated and committed, some now for more than a year, because they know how to craft stories that do "get things done" -- most often by shaming local officials into doing their jobs better, or getting local police to stop using the disabled parking bays when doing their grocery shopping! -- and they get some collegiality and conviviality that comes from a work like experience. Many are unemployed, but some have jobs and want to make a difference. In each group about a fifth - about four or five people per training group -- really get into it. (And we working hard to figure out more about why that is, and how to up these numbers).

But, taken overall, this set of approaches has produced about 70 published stories we would not otherwise have had in past six months. Our first trainings in 2009 produced few viable stories and little longevity of interest. It has only been when we have created a more holistic experience, honed in on training and post training "space" that builds confidence and starts creating some sense of identify as citizen journalists, that we're starting to see more regular contributions and, even more gratifying, some great journalism.

Its early days, but "watch this space" -- it might yet be filled with citizen journalism some day.

(For examples of some of the citizen journalism produced by the Iindaba Ziyafika project, see http://www.grocotts.co.za/category/section/mymakana and other sections of Grocott's Mail online)

Grocott's Mail has been serving the small community of Grahamstown, South Africa with local news and information for a long time (140 years precisely on May 11). Grocott's Online -- which got going properly a year ago -- caters to those who prefer pixels to paper, but until now, locals with mobile phones haven't had a comprehensive way of being informed about what's on the go in Grahamstown.

Launch of Grahamstown NOW

Enter Grahamstown NOW, the first concerted attempt by Grocott's Mail to provide news and real-time information to Grahamstonians on a mobile platform. It's part of the Knight-funded Iindaba Ziyafika project and is led by Michael Salzwedel, New Media Editor at Grocott's Mail. Here's what Michael emailed me when I asked for some info about the technical side of the project:

It's not fancy or shiny - on the surface it appears to be just another mobisite. But there's a lot of depth below that surface. What it lacks in glitz and glam, it makes up for in its ability to serve up a snapshot at any given point in time of what's just happened, currently happening, or about to happen in Grahamstown.

Grahamstown NOW focuses on providing practical, immediately usable information directly related to the living out of the daily lives of people in Grahamstown. The idea is that Grahamstown NOW should become the central aggregator of as much as possible of Grahamstown's news and informational content, ultimately enabling citizens to make more considered decisions.

The launch version of Grahamstown NOW provides the following content:

• Event listings: These are pulled in from the Grocott's online events calendar. Users can submit their own events directly from their phones.
• Business specials: What's currently on special (at registered businesses) at any given time in Grahamstown, and how much longer those specials are on for (or time until they start).
• News items: The latest and most popular stories from Grocott's Online.
• Webcam snapshots: Users can see current views from a number of webcams across Grahamstown. This will include "stream cam" that captures the queues at the local source of fresh spring water. With Grahamstown experiencing both drought and water quality problems, rich and poor are queuing for hours to supplement their municipal supply at the spring. It would great to be able to check on your phone for a real-time lull in the queue!
• Movie screenings: What's coming up next at the local cinema.
• Radio shows: What's on now and coming up next on local radio stations.
• Weather conditions: Should you grab a jacket or an umbrella? Check on Grahamstown NOW.
• Tweets: Latest tweets from @grocotts, and the latest tweets mentioning Grahamstown.
• SMSes: Latest SMSes received by Grocott's Online (MMS support coming soon).
• Ride offers/requests: A simple matching service.

The emphasis is on time and timing of events and specials and happenings around town. There is also an emphasis on freshness and "nowness." So while many sites allow you to see what's on in the next few days or weeks, or tomorrow's weather, Grahamstown NOW focuses only on today's happenings, weather, shows and commercial specials. If you want to know what's on tomorrow, check in with us again closer to that time.

All About Now

This approach might not work for congenitally forward-planning people, but it is, in testing at least, proving to be a great way to cut through the clutter of most sites, and curate information and news through the singular lens of currentness. Grahamstown NOW only gives you the very latest news story or two, not all of them. If you want to know what's coming up next on the local radio station, we'll tell you -- but not about the show after that.

Instead of comprehensiveness, Grahamstown NOW is much more like Twitter or a Facebook wall. It's about the latest, most current information. If you snooze, you lose that part of the stream.

Michael and his team are enthusiastic about how useful this could be.

"Most of the above can be displayed according to time (countdown until something begins or ends), so the home page and section pages are dynamic and never look the same," he said. "Users might see that a jazz concert is starting in an hour and 30 minutes, or that a 2-for-1 pizza special at a local restaurant started two hours ago, or that the next showing of a certain movie begins in 20 minutes, or that a public council meeting is scheduled for two days' time."

Grahamstown NOW is primarily meant to be accessed with a mobile phone, but there's also a desktop version. For now, that's simply the mobile version contained within a mobile phone graphic, with additional Javascript and AJAX functionality to enhance the user experience by allowing easier inputs and no page reloads. We are debating 'converging' our Grahamstown NOW website and the Grocott's Online Website.

Users can also interact with the site by leaving "chirps" (comments), submitting their own events and ride offers, and easily sharing content with friends via email or WAP pushes.

Integration With Nika

I asked Michael to outline why Grahamstown NOW will work in our small town, and how it fits in with what we're trying to do with the Nika system we developed. He replied:

The average Grahamstownian is not rich, does not have an expensive phone, and is very conscious of how much they're spending on data. Thus, the first version of Grahamstown NOW has been designed to be accessed on even the simplest of Internet-enabled phones, and the HTML has been 'minified' to reduce bandwidth consumption.

Later in the year, Grahamstown NOW will be integrated with Nika. The aim is for Nika to become the central CMS for all Grocott's Mail's offerings: The print edition, Grocott's Mail Online, Grahamstown NOW, our SMS headline service and our upcoming instant messaging offerings (which will include selected Grahamstown NOW content).

Nika 2.0, which is now available as a free download, is evolving into a more comprehensive and mobile-orientated CMS. At its heart Nika is an editing workflow suite and digital content manager; but Nika also has additional functionality for community newspapers in that it can take SMS and instant messages directly into editing streams, and send SMS and IMs back to cell phones. Overall, Nika is great for generating user generated content and for easily getting headlines (and soon whole stories) back out to users' cell phones.

Future versions of Grahamstown NOW will have more differentiation between what is served up to PCs and to mobile phones, will include geo-location functionality so users can see business or event locations on a map or tag their social networking interactions or content submissions with their location, and will have tighter integration with Facebook.

For now, we think Grahamstown NOW offers immediate benefits for citizens -- with a particular emphasis on "immediate." Grahamstown NOW will launch officially in mid June 2010.

It's one of the cleverest bits of Orwellian double speak the south African government (or in this case the government-owned electricity company ESKOM) has ever cooked up. It means, in plain English, power cuts -- as in cutting off electricity to whole areas. Not because there is any extra "load" (i.e. a surplus) of electricity that needs to be "shed," but rather because there is too little electricity to go around. So different chunks of the country have to take turns having no electricity.

In 2008, we dealt with the grim reality of load shedding, and, although it only lasted a few months, the irregular four to six-hour cuts were hugely inconvenient. Even when a time-table listing future cuts came out and regularity was introduced, it made everyone very depressed that our "can-do" country -- a nation that produces about 25 percent of the entire continent of Africa's GDP -- could be reduced to frequent power cuts, albeit cuts with fancy names.

Why the history lesson? Because recently, Grocotts Mail, together with Indaba ZIyafika's new citizen journalism editor and two citizen/student journalists who received training from our Knight-funded program, broke the story of what might be a world first: Water-shedding in Grahamstown.

Yes, that's right: Our drought here has gotten so bad that the local authority is seriously thinking about rationing water, and, possibly, cutting off whole areas of our city on some kind of rotation for unspecified periods of time. Electricity cuts were gloomy enough, but water?! That's enough to put a real damper on our national mood, and even drive some of us to drink (ok, enough with puns!)

Of course, it might yet rain a lot, and voluntary restraints (already in place) and some restrictions such as a ban on the use of hoses in gardens, might all work to advert this "water shedding" situation. But whatever happens, we helped break the story.

Our New Citizen Journalism Editor

The other piece of big news here is that on Tuesday of this week, Kwanele Butana became what we think is the first "citizen journalism editor" in South Africa, and perhaps in all of Africa. Citizen journalism or citizen media editors seem have been around for four or five years in the U.S. and elsewhere, but full-time appointments are rare in our part of the world. Kwanele is working with citizen journalists who have received basic training and who also earn a bit of money for doing quality journalism. The compensation aspect is also pretty new.

Overall, our Iindaba Ziyafika project is starting to come together in a big way. First there is the tech side: We built a content management system and work-flow management software called Nika that allows integrates reporting via text message. We're now adding instant messaging and are also enabling the site to be optimized via web-enabled phones. The mobile site is called called Grahamstown Now, and we're launching in May. I'll be talking about it at the 11th International Symposium on Online Journalism. Llve video streaming will be available.

The big deal from a tech point of view is being able to gather submissions via things like text message and instant messages and get news and info back out to audiences. The suite of Nika products enable us to "edit once" and then publish multiple times (SMS, IM, mobile).

So that's all very cool, we think. But its not going to take us very far if we only have a small group of professional journalists trying to engage in hyper-local journalism. So we also provide some training for citizen journalists, and allow some of the best citizen journalists who emerge from our 20-hour course to join in the full daily news diary meetings.

As I've blogged in previous posts, some of our citizen journalists receive payment. Even though they are very humble payments (that's my Orwellian double speak for "we're cheap and the payments are small!"), it is much appreciated in our resource-poor town.

Our citizen journalism trainer Elvera Van Noort blogged a bit about the training she is conducting and our editor, Steven Lang, recently addressed a major conference in Berlin about how we are using citizen journalism in our small town. He defending the whole notion of citizen journalism to some pretty skeptical Europeans.

Nika For All

In terms of Nika, a big of a plug: we'll help any community newspaper that's interested in using Nika. We do give priority to African non-profit papers in terms of helping set things up, but if you want to check it out, visit here.

If you like the web-based version of Nika (we use it mostly for demos) and have some LAMP installation experience or tech skills, you can download and install the full stand-alone version from the same website. Our IM and mobile interfaces are still in development and are not currently in Nika 2.0, but Nika 3.0 will be out in the wild come July.

Between our training approach and tech approach, we believe we're developing powerful learning's for community papers who want better ways to reach audiences through their cell phones, and more participation from "the people formally known as the audience."

The Knight Foundation entrusted us with a lot of money to make the Nika suite of products work, so we'd love your feedback.

As I outlined in my previous post, when you are small and local, and don't have much money to invest in investigative journalism, it's essential to have citizen journalists who can help out. But how do we provide them with enough skills and motivation to get information out of officialdom? How do we act on the Knight Commission's recommendations, in particular to "get government at all levels to operate transparently, facilitate easy and low-cost access to public records..." and to "develop systematic quality measures of community information ecologies, and study how they affect social outcomes"?

This is a particular challenge when a big reason for the lack of "easy and low cost access" is not deliberate obstreperousness, (at least, I like to think it is not!) but rather a lack of skills on government's part, and a lack of easy ways for the public to find and access information. While parts of government are digitizing, and the typewriters are (mostly) gone, it is still amazing how little information is available in digital format in South Africa.

To overcome this, we're discovering you have to roll up your sleeves and, at least at a local level, if you have the resources, actually offer to help. Among other projects, we're meeting with the local police and we are close to a deal where we'll help them capture their daily crime reports in digital format. It helps them do their work better, and it could be a hugely important resource for us as a newspaper website.

We're also working with the city council to create and publish clear visual organograms on our website of 'who does what', 'who reports to whom', and how to contact the right city official when you have a problem. We have plans to publish our city council's meeting agendas and, post meetings, the minutes of those meetings, or record of decisions.

But we've also been thinking hard about the possibly even bigger challenges of "enhancing the information capacity of individuals" and the recommendation the commissioners made to "support the activities of information providers to reach local audiences with quality content through all appropriate media, such as mobile." This recommendation goes to the heart of the Iindaba Ziyafika project. We've had a very busy few months, and there are many new projects and sub-projects that directly address these issues of information maximization -- getting more out -- and ease of access -- getting it out in way that is easy to understand and useful. Here's how some of our projects are being taken to the next level.

Intensifying Citizen Journalism Training

In terms of citizen journalism, it's becoming ever more clear that even a modest amount of training goes a long way. We seem to be settling in at around 20 hours of training. More might be too much from a cost point of view (you can never have too much journalism training!), but it appears that 20 hours of well designed, assignment-intensive teaching seems about right. This training must builds on a selection process that helps find the kind of people who have what we believe are core journalism aptitudes: curiosity, a desire to change things, and the ability to persevere where others would give up!

Our second group of 40 adult citizen journalists are now a month into their training. They attend a two-hour session each week. After six weeks -- 12 hours of face-to-face training and a bunch of assignments -- we're confident they'll be ready to get to work. From our first adult group last year, we already have a few 'stars' writing some great stories -- stories we would otherwise have never got wind of.

We're also putting together a Citizen Journalism training manual, and I'm excited to be writing a paper for presentation at the World Journalism Education Council conference called "What do citizen journalists need to know and when do they need to know it." (Shameless plug: This is going to be a stunning conference, with more than 200 delegates confirmed from around the globe, and strong African participation. It also overlaps with the Highway Africa conference, the biggest annual gathering of African journalists anywhere, and with the Soccer World Cup. And, for anyone who wants to see what we're up to, I'll be giving tours of our pioneering citizen journalism newsroom, Radio Grahamstown, and Grocott's Mail).

All of this is a major escalation of our approach to citizen journalism -- we're going all out to see what will work, what is sustainable, and what will generate good and useful journalism.

A Citizen Journalism Editor

A big insight for us is that, at small papers, while it's great to have a group of trained citizen journalists at an editor's disposal, you need to provide the time and resources needed to nurture them, as well as to edit and fact-check their work. We have decided to appoint a new "citizen journalism editor" who will concentrate and focus on this group of neophyte writers.

This editor will also help us get on top of understanding -- and learning to explain better -- how power works in our small town: How do you get something done? Who delivers and who doesn't? How do you complain and get listened to without having to organise a small riot or, for the better off among our population, without having to pony up for a lawyers letter of demand?

Paying for Citizen Journalism

Providing training and close editorial support might be enough to generate some great stories, but we also believe that, in a town where about half the population live on about U.S. $4 per day, both material incentives (cash and mobile airtime) and non-material incentives (certificates, allowing the publishing of bylines) go a long way. Starting this month, we are experimenting with paying about U.S. $10 for a published story and U.S. $7 for a published photo.

As humble as these stipends might be, we suspect they are going to be just reward for good citizen journalism, and we are counting on these payments to make the whole experience more sustainable.

Opening Up Our Editorial Meeting

We've also decided to allow the most skilled and enthusiastic members of our first adult citizen journalist graduating class of 2009 to attend Grocott Mail's daily 8.30 a.m. news meetings.

These citizen journalists receive the same small payment as the other 36 graduates who are not coming to the meetings, but they have an edge on the others by having earned the opportunity to be in the place where stories ideas are thrown around and reporting tasks are allocated.

Headlines by Text Message

Finally, we're going live this week -- after six months of testing -- with our text message news headline service. To the left is an ad for the service.

We're looking at signing up a few thousand people out of the local population of 100,000, all of whom will then get one or more of our various free short message daily news headlines, and our more occasional breaking news services. One of the big issues for us, once we got the tech right, has been around audience acquisition, figuring out what we need to know about our users, and when we should gather that information. There's also the challenge of getting the business model right. Our plan is first to build the audience, and then to, for example, start selling the last 20 or 30 characters of the text message to local advertisers.

In my next post I'll share more about three new Citizen Journalism/youth journalism radio initiatives we're working on together with our local community radio station, Radio Grahamstown. The first of these is a new show called Y4Y ('youth for youth') launched two weeks ago. While the show covers news from local high schools, it also creates the space for discussing issues of importance to youth. Frankly we're amazed, just two shows in, at how edgy and interesting these discussions are turning out to be. If you want to listen to the streaming audio of the first two shows or download them as podcasts, go here

The fact that communication between government and us citizens is so poor is arguably part of the reason why we are reportedly second only to China in terms of the number of social protests per day (and they have 20 times our population).

In many areas, government is doing more than people know, but the lack of data sharing and access to basic information helps incite anger and frustration. We lack useful information in electronic format about everything from police and ambulance response times, waste disposal, street light repair, and pothole repair, not to mention bigger issues like the provision of good social housing, the construction of new medical clinics, and data about school performance. better. Here in South Africa, anger often translates into marches, strikes, barricades and sometimes riots,. People have figured out that there is nothing like a well organised, small riot to open up the information flow.

With this background in mind, the recent Knight Commission report, Informing Communities: Sustaining Democracy in the Digital age, is helping our Iindaba Ziyafika project in South Africa. We're approaching some of our information flow priorities with fresh insights. The deep thinking that has gone into the Commission's report -- and its unusual citizen-centric perspective as opposed to focusing on the typical 'how do we save newspapers or journalism' approach -- is refreshing and useful.

The three big areas the commission explored, with a U.S.-only focus, are: "Maximizing the Availability of Relevant and Credible Information," "Enhancing the Information Capacity of Individuals," and "Promoting Public Engagement." Below are some reflections on the first area; some thoughts on what we're doing (or trying to do) in terms of the second and third will follow in the next few weeks.

Making Information Available

First, in terms of "Maximizing the Availability of Relevant and Credible Information," we've been struck by how much information there is about government, and yet how historically inaccessible it has been, even in advanced democracies like the U.S. That much is clear from the Commission's work. And, in South Africa, much of this information is even less easily available, and rarely in digital form.

The same is even more true in the rest of Africa. Basic information -- the building blocks of representative democracy -- such as knowing the timing of a local government body meeting (a city council, or municipal executive), what the agenda is etc. can be seriously hard to come by. And if available, getting it as Word document is often just as challenging.

There are other challenges, too. Though the press, and newspapers in particular, have had the resources to attend government meetings and access agendas, minutes and other documents, they have only reported on a small subset of the available information. This was usually what was deemed the most interesting through the usual but often fairly arbitrary agenda setting of editors.

There's a lot more wrong with the traditional news reporting approach than just narrow subject selection. Most of the time, reporting is about 'what's happened,' rather than what's still coming up, and why we should sit up and take notice. In other words, the news is so often about decisions made, and issues that we can often no longer do much about.

We're finding that a more proactive, anticipatory (and participatory) journalism is more essential in areas where the municipality or local authority does not make unmediated information easily available.

As Peter M Shane, the executive director of the Commission mentioned in a subsequent speech about the Knight commission's work:

A community without public accountability suffers from unresponsive government. Neglect is common, corruption all too plausible. Money is wasted, as government officials are slow and awkward at doing what other governments do quickly and nimbly. Voter turnout is low, not because people are satisfied, but because people are resigned.

Sadly, these words could describe almost all local government in South Africa. Some are better than others, and our area, the Makana municipality, is one of the most efficient and effective. But they are not communication champs. And part of their relative efficiency, if this is fairly measured, relates, I believe, to having an independent newspaper, Grocott's Mail, doing journalism in our town for 140 years without a break.

In 2008, Grocott's Mail even took the local municipality and mayor to court after they withdraw local government advertising in the wake of a series of critical stories about financial mismanagement by the council. The case was big deal, and widely followed in South Africa. The council didn't have a leg to stand on, which is why they eventually settled out of court. But this only happened after our dogged local paper was deprived of critical advertising revenue for many months.

Asking Citizen Journalists to Step Up

Taking up the Knight Commission's cudgels to maximise the amount of information (and ensure it is both credible and "the right information at the right time"), we've been focusing on finding the information and getting it out. To do this, we're embracing citizen journalism in more complex ways than before, including exploring different ways of training, editing, nurturing, rewarding and recognizing our citizen journalists. We're doing this because, like many small newspapers, we don't have the labour power to cover all the important civic issues well. We're hoping our citizen journalists will be more able to do the work of ferreting out existing data and information.

Most times, the information is there -- it just takes a really patient person to find it, stand in queues, whine, beg, plead and push... It is not for the easily discouraged, nor is it easy to do for our few busy professional journalists, each of whom has a few pages to fill virtually on their own.

So how best to inculcate a desire (and impart the necessary skills) to push and prod and persevere to get information out of every level of the state? And what does one do when a lot of the information and data is in the same format as it was before the digital age? Will people volunteer to photocopy the daily handwritten police reports and capture them in a digital system? Or do we try and encourage local government to catch the digital wave faster than it has so far?

In my next post, I'll share more of what we're doing, and share some big milestones and next steps for getting more useful news and information in and out. This includes ideas for allowing citizen journalists to join the usually jealously protected daily news diary meeting at the paper, and some ideas of how unearth and digitize much needed sources of information in our small town.

That page features 12 stories about a critical but little-covered topic that goes to the heart of the divergent experiences of living in Grahamstown, South Africa. The topic? Waste management. Perhaps it's hardly a prepossessing topic, but it's one that was embraced by the first group of adult Citizen Journalists to be trained in the Iindaba Ziyafika ("The news is coming") Citizen Journalism Newsroom.

After handing out certificates of completion to the proud graduates of our first young adult group of trainees, and then reading these stories, I was struck by two things. First, how just a little training had produced so much enthusiasm, and flashes of real journalistic skill; second, just how hyper-local citizen journalism could make a profound difference in Grahamstown. We've always thought so, and it was the basis of Iindaba Ziyafika winning a Knight News Challenge Grant in 2008, but now we can actually see it!

Some of the waste stories have already got the municipality jumping. The fair-minded approach taken by many of the writers managed to not alienate the authorities, which is an easy thing to do in South Africa. We are encouraging all those who had their assignments published (as well as the other people that were part of the 40-strong group of trainees) to follow up on their stories, and to inspire residents and the authorities to work together to change things.

Lessons From a Year of Citizen Journalism

Looking back at the first year of our experiment to create citizen journalism in Grahamstown, we've learned a lot. Firstly, while school-age learners are able to engage with civic issues -- and it is critical that we encourage them to do so -- young post-school adults past the voting age of 18 appear to have both more interest and more agency when it comes to citizen journalism.

Teenagers at school are strongly focused on identity issues and want to write about issues related to identity. Getting them engaged in covering issues of why the municipality is not removing the garbage, for example, just doesn't grab most of them. But thinking about and writing about relationships -- especially in a South Africa that has the third highest HIV/AIDS prevalence in the world -- has a great deal more appeal for young people at school.

We've also noticed that post-school adults are more able to write about the problems with our schools, when compared to those still at school. It is tough for pupils to highlight serious issues when they are engaged in unequal power relationships in local schools.

All of this is refining what we do with school-going youth in terms of citizen journalism. With unemployment rates among local youth hovering at about 70 percent, there is natural interest in civic issues and entrepreneurship. There is also a deep desire to get local authorities to do keep their election promises, and deliver on the ruling party's vision of "a better live for all."

We realized, too, that for citizen journalism to be meaningful, trainees have to imbibe and even embrace the norms of news journalism. As contested as these norms are, there are some baselines to adhere to: telling the story with some narrative comprehensiveness, for example the classic "who, what, where and when" of a basic news report; and having at least a stab at objectivity and fairness.

Most of the waste management stories give the municipality or the local councilor a chance to say why things are not working the way they should. That's why even the more unconventional stories work pretty well.

New Initiatives for 2010

At their graduation ceremony, our first group of young adult learners strongly urged us to lengthen the training by ending it off with a Saturday morning "intensive" workshop. (The training is currently 1.5 hours a week for six weeks, plus assignments.) They also asked us to consider paying for some of their contributions. We're evaluating both requests as part of end of year strategic review.

We're excited by how some of our initiatives are starting to get traction, as corporate strategists might say. Our school-based trainees are doing great work with our new community radio show (read transcripts of the shows at
http://www.grocotts.co.za/content/izwi-labahlali-voice-citizens), and we're also learning a lot about how print and radio journalism can work together with cell phones. On our last half hour radio show, we had 20 people sending in text messages.

In the new year, we'll be using our content management system, Nika, to read the messages on air, and also to send out messages to the audience in order to create more of a two-way dialogue. We also want to do that with voice calls, of course, but that's going to mean investing in a vital piece of equipment -- a call hybrid. Even though these cost only about $200, our community radio station is one of many that have never been able to afford one.

We've got no doubt that with more adult citizen journalism training sessions in 2010, and a reorientation to provide more opportunities for identity-exploring journalism by our school-aged participants, 2010 is going to be a great year for the Iindaba Ziyafika's citizen journalism project.

That's partly why we've launched Izwi Labahlali (The Voice Of The Citizens), Grahamstown's first radio show with content that's largely produced and presented by citizen journalists and transmitted mainly in iziXhosa, the dominant local language.

The show, which airs on Radio Grahamstown on 102.1 FM, gives citizen journalists who have completed a six-week course in the Grocott's Mail Citizen Journalism Newsroom an extra platform to report what's going on in their communities. (Their contributions also appear online and in Grocott's print edition.)

The show is being aired on a trial-run basis every Wednesday in November between 5 p.m. and 5:30 p.m. It will become a permanent show in early 2010, possibly with a longer time slot.

For the trial run, Khaya Thonjeni is hosting the show. Khaya is the schools outreach officer for our Knight News Challenge-funded project, Iindaba Ziyafika ("The News is coming"). Khaya is joined by different young citizen journalists each week. (You can listen to the shows online here.)

The radio show is intended to play a significant role in realizing our project's aim of making news something that is increasingly consumed -- and produced -- by all citizens of Grahamstown. The idea is that it will get people talking about issues that matter to them, thereby giving them more of a sense of belonging in their community.

At this stage, we have given two six-week courses in citizen journalism. Thanks to the content our students are producing in print and our new radio experience, we are learning a great deal about what works and doesn't work in this multi-lingual, low literacy area.

Providing Guidance to Citizen Journalists

We give our trainees the latitude to write about anything they want, but we are also discovering it helps to focus their energy around specific themes. Some of the current group of 40 adults taking the training will soon be working on issues of waste management. We have myriad of waste issues in Grahamstown, from uncollected garbage on the streets to landfill usage. Others will be put into groups to look at issues such as local democracy.

Just as it takes a professional journalist a long time to work out the dynamics of a beat, the same is true for a citizen journalist. It takes time, energy and dedication to build up an understanding -- and contacts -- related to a specific topic. We realize we need to create more opportunities for these specializations to grow, and we need to seed and suggest these opportunities to our citizen journalists.

Dealing With Power Issues

We are also encountering issues of power and respect. Many government officials often won't speak to full-time journalists, so why would they take a call from someone describing themselves as a citizen journalists? We issue graduates of our CJ course a citizen journalist press card that identifies them and gives our contact number at Grocott's Mail. This is so that any prospective interviewee can check out if a person is who they say they are.

These uneven power relations are particularly acute for our younger reporters. They often want to write about conditions in their schools, but fear the power of their teachers. This is part of the reason why we are now focusing their energy towards other social challenges in their areas, and away from their schools. Poorly functioning schools are not keen on being exposed by their own pupils, and we hope that some of our brave adult CJ reporters can tackle this issue.

In order to tackle controversial issues, we realize we need to spend more time talking about being how they can stand up in the face of power, and learn to push their sources. We find some people just persevere more than others. For example, this is a well put together piece of reporting that one of our current course participants researched and wrote. It's really worth reading, just to get a sense of what is possible. It even includes a quote from a municipal official!

Different People, Different Reasons for Trying Reporting

The above article is written by Andile Ecalpar Nayika, a 21 year-old student from Joza Location. This is some of what he wrote about his motivation to get into our oversubscribed CJ course:

I survive in Phumlani Location in the eastern part of Grahamstown, Joza Location. I am 21 years of age and I am a student at East Cape Midlands College... I have been a prominent member of my high school newspaper, Edu Buzz of EduCollege. Then a year later, I went on to become one of six Founders of East Cape Modlands College's of the very first Newspaper, 'The Midlands Voice'. At the moment I am a newsreader at Radio Grahamstown 102.1 FM. I have a lot of intent on scribing and telling more stories about my life experience and the surrounding I am in because it is what makes me.

It is clear why Andile wants to do the CJ course. Some people simply want to get the news out about their church's activities. Others take the course to see if this is something that might interest them. And then there are those who feel compelled to try this in the hope of finding work -- adult unemployment rates are above 50 percent in Grahamstown.

We're thinking through what these multiple motivations might mean for our courses, and whether we can (and should) screen harder for those candidates who want to "change the world," "make a difference," or "speak truth to power," for example. (Currently, prospective candidates have to provide a written account of their motivations, and some are interviewed.)

In this vein, we're also having to think much more broadly about what "building social capital" (one of our project's overarching goals) means, and how that intersects, or not, with our other overarching aim: enlarging the public sphere in Grahamstown, and deepening democracy.

Preparing for the World Cup

It's been an exciting few weeks as more and more elements of the overall Iindaba Ziyafika project get off the ground. It is early days (even though we've been at it for a year), and 2010 will be a big year for testing how our citizen journalism newsroom, our CJ training courses, the multiple input and output methods we are creating (and, in some cases, pioneering), all come together.

Next year is especially important because South Africa will host the World Cup in June 2010, and the second World Journalism Education Congress, titled "Journalism Education in an Age of Radical Change," will convene July 2010 in Grahamstown.

We are excited by what we're achieving -- and we're confident we'll have more and more stories to tell about the Citizen journalism that is happening in Grahamstown, and what we're learning from it.

The Iindaba Ziyafika newsroom has 10 computers and the ability to download photos and content from any cellphone (both wirelessly and through the most amazing collection of cables!). This means anyone can walk in, write a story, download a photo and get it published on the Grocott's website, or in the twice weekly print edition of Grocott's Mail.

You can watch this great SoundSlide show which captures the vibe and importance of the launch. Even the local mayor attended and cut a ribbon!

The newsroom is being used to provide ordinary South Africans with computer, cellphone and journalism skills. About 2,000 people will be trained over three years, and a third group of 40 teenagers from a local school have just completed a six-module, 10-hour course. For many of these students, this was their first time on a computer. Being able to send an SMS story (almost everyone has a cellphone) and see it show up on a website was an amazing experience.

First time on a computer, first email address

Most of these initial learners have had no prior access to computers or even email, and opening up their first email account and getting an email address was a big deal for them. If you can remember the thrill of sending your first email -- do you remember? -- you'll probably recall that something in your head told to you 'this is important and cool.' That's exactly what happened for the young people who completed the first course. They were thrilled to have a Gmail account and to be able to use it!

Check out this little video that some journalism students at Rhodes made about this first group of young citizen journalists. It's amazing to see how such a short course can open up so many possibilities.

Many of these students will be working on creating school newsletters and a school yearbook or annual magazine. All the well-resourced schools in Grahamstown produce these items, but none of the poorer schools can afford them. We're also hoping to receive more photos from their cellphones as well as stories and story tips. We are working on creating a new half-hour weekly show on community radio, "What's Up Grahamstown," that will launch next year and be filled entirely with citizen journalism content.

The Nika content management system

The launch of Nika content management system was also very successful. We have an online version of this very powerful CMS, which is build on Drupal. Nika is a citizen journalism platform that incorporates SMS and other forms of mobile messaging. In order to explain what it does, below I have included the text of the invite we sent out to all the attendees at Highway Africa. It covers all of Nika's new features and explains a bit about our decision to launch first with an online version and only supply the stand-alone LAMP based system to newspapers who want it later on. The text:

FOR DELEGATES WHO WORK ON NEWSPAPERS, OR ARE INVOLVED IN MEDIA DEVELOPMENT

At this year's Highway Africa conference we will be running two workshops on Nika where we will demonstrate how to use the system. Each workshop participant will be given a CD containing the installation software for the online version, as well as a user manual and installation guide. The costs for this are being met by our funder, and the software and documentation will be made available under a Creative Commons licence.

I'll blog more about Nika soon, but we've received a lot of great feedback, and we're looking forward to helping South African and African community newspapers get going with this powerful CMS.

Take crime for example: a newspaper might learn of a dozen small incidents taking place in their town, but only cover a few that are deemed newsworthy according a set of gate keeping decisions that differs by paper. Sometimes only bigger crimes get reported or, in South Africa, crime where there is actual violence. Cell phone snatching or clothes being pilfered off someone's clothesline is not likely to earn any column inches in even the smallest papers.

And yet it might well not be the size of the crime, nor its nature, nor the levels of violence that are interesting and newsworthy. Rather, it might have everything to do with proximity. You may already know if your immediate neighbor's laundry got pinched off the line, but you might not know that such deeds are happening two or three blocks away. A veritable small-scale clothesline crime wave may be happening (and may be coming your way!) without you knowing.

Of course it's very hard to cover all crime comprehensively using the print medium. But doing it online, and using various forms of visualization like crime incident maps -- elements of which can easily be reproduced in the print edition -- is an approach that holds a great deal of promise for small newspapers eager to reinvent their role in local communities.

There are lots of organizations, including the Knight Foundation and its grantees, that are looking hard at making this kind of hyperlocal information available. EveryBlock is the most famous and has done pioneering work. (It was recently bought by MSNBC.com.) David Sasaki, also a Knight News Challenge winner, wrote a very useful overview earlier this year about how maps can create social change and community involvement.

Inspired by these pioneers, what we have in mind in South Africa is to pursue a focus on the visual presentation of material, with map overlays and mouse-overs that reveal an incident and link it to further reports, context etc.

Mapping out a strategy

We are focused on launching at least four kinds of maps this year, and we know there are a lot of issues. Knight grantee Leslie Rule, in a thoughtful post about hyperlocal mapping, talks about being at a conference where an audience member argued that hyperlocal crime mapping websites can "reinforce stereotypes about where crime occurs, and more importantly, who commits it.... And don't necessarily inform the community, offer insight into issues, or shed light on potential solution"

David Sasaki also made the point that "2009 I believe will be the year of developing map-based interfaces which enable neighbors to share information with one another, leading to direct action and increased community involvement." (This is as opposed to, I suppose, just receving the information.)

We want to inspire people to take action, find community solutions, and pressure police to do their job well (arriving to help when called to do so is a big deal here in South Africa). We also want to help communities and the police see patterns of crime, For example, Grahamstown seems to be South Africa's leading city for laptop theft, with more than one pinched every day.

To do all of this well, we know we'll have to move beyond information provision and stimulate, encourage and possibly even facilitate organized responses. Hopefully,this powerfully conveyed new information and accompanying investigative journalism will spur action by readers and users.

We are of course looking beyond crime as well.

At Grocott's Mail, and as part of our Knight funded Iindaba Ziyafika project, we're also looking at ways of combining citizen reporting and local sources of data such as daily police reports, property valuations and sales, information about government services (such as opening times of government health clinics and when specialists are on duty), as well as a range of information about entertainment, sporting events, and upcoming community events.

Challenges of data-driven information

There appear to be three challenges in providing these kinds of data driven, information-heavy services. The first is getting a regular supply of data so the information is up-to-date, useful, and has a 'news' quality to it. The second is selecting ways of displaying the information so that it is most useful to readers. Will maps do the trick, and how scalable and searchable do they need to be? What kind of filters can we provide? The third challenge is allowing for comments, feedback and their aggregation, which will transform some of raw data into trend analysis type stories.

With the example of crime information, much of the required information appears to be available from local police stations and emergency response agencies. Depending on the country and the police station, it is often free available. In the U.S., the information is available in digital form, which is the whole rationale behind the automated parts of EveryBlock.

In South Africa, both the format and the level of accessibility seem to differ. It looks like we might be able to get access to crime reports at the local police, but only in hand-written form! So there's some work to be done!

This type of approach does take time and effort. It's a very different kind of journalism. But whether it focuses on hyperlocal crime, hyperlocal pollution and health issues, local economies, or information about the provision of local services, this approach provides an essential, missing link between what citizens find useful to know, and information that can inspire them to help change things in their community.

Getting off the ground in South Africa

Four graduate students have received scholarships from the Iindaba Ziyafika project and are working to getting these projects off the ground. They are being supervised by Vin Crosbie, an international expert in new media (among other things). You can read about his recent experiences working with us on his blog.

By the end of 2009, our work will be available online at the Grocott's website and in truncated form in the print edition.

In a separate project, we're also looking at how Grocott's online can be a conduit for greater involvement in civic life. We hope to create an early warning system that can alert people when important local issues are coming up for debate or decision by the government. Too much reporting of civic events is done in the past tense; it is critical, we believe, to anticipate and frame information for people in a way that encourages participation. I'll blog about some of our thinking and plans for that in the near future.

Meanwhile, and to conclude, the big news from South Africa is that the first (as far as we know!) Citizen Journalism Newsroom is opening formally on September 8 in the Grocott's Mail office in downtown Grahamstown. We're already using the facility, providing training and getting ready. (We have computer terminals and other facilities available for people come in and use.)

We're also launching our citizen Journalist "Photo of the Week" competition with a small weekly cash prize, and our CJ "Story of the Week," which also carries a small cash prize. We'll see if the walk-in facility at the office and the incentives start increasing the already impressive flow of stories and photos already coming in.

Finally, we also launching the Drupal based NIKA Content Management System at Highway Africa with two half-day trainings for community newspapers from across the country and the continent. Not only is NIKA a great CMS, but it also facilitates the direct reception of SMS through a modem and some Kannel-based SMS gateway bridges.

NIKA will initially be served over the web, but the stand-alone fully installed LAMP system, with Drupal and NIKA configurations, will be rolled out as users move beyond the web-only offering later this year.

Keep watching this space in September for some links to our official launch and some training photos!

Whether this is about a "growing dependence on the state to provide everything" or just people getting on with their lives -- getting involved takes a lot of time -- is not clear.

Bowling Alone

What has caused this South African equivalent of "bowling alone"? In Robert Putnam's 2000 book, "Bowling Alone: the Collapse and Revival of American Community," the author rails against the how social capital in the U.S., which he describes as "the very fabric of our connections with each other," has plummeted in just one generation.

Putnam came to his conclusions about declining levels of social capital from studies of membership of organizations of all kinds, interest in politics (even the signing of petitions has fallen, his study found) and, surprisingly, the amount of time spent with family and friends. Putnam's bogeymen in terms of this mass disengagement of the social are urban sprawl, television, and the rise of the Internet.

Is it the same in South Africa? Why are studies and scenario exercises picking up on a decline in civic activism, participation in clubs, trade unions, political parties and so on?

To trying to figure this out, and do something about it, at least in one small town. That's part of the Iindaba Ziyafika (isiXhosa for "the news is coming") project, run out of the School for Journalism and Media Studies at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa. The core proposition of Iindaba Ziyafika is that information and communication technology can enlarge the public sphere by providing the tools that encourage participation and facilitate that participation.

News by SMS

To achieve this, step one has to been to build a content management system, known as Nika, which allows people to send in news and information about what is happening in their communities through SMS. This information is published on the website and in the newspaper of Grocott's Mail, South Africa's oldest independent newspaper. (Grocott's recently relaunched their website, built to receive content from Nika. The site is served from Grocott's office, off a module called THATHA, which is a set of tightly integrated Drupal-based templates for publishing to the web).

Nika (isiXhosa for "to give") is proving its worth. Built on Drupal, it allows any community newspaper to receive SMS messages directly into the newspaper's workflow. By translating SMS messages through a special modem and some clever coding, the messages appear as text in the editor's inbox. Story tips or even full stories can be sent by ordinary people, who do not have access to email or the internet.

The system has been tested at Grocott's Mail for almost year, and is currently being tested at three other community newspapers. It will be available with some installation guidance and operating manuals to any community newspaper who wants to try it out by September 2009. (Watch this space for details of downloads.)

Nika's ability to receive messages from citizens directly into a newspaper's news feed gives ordinary people a voice they might not have had. For example, when teachers at a Grahamstown school went on strike and threatened the life of the school principal, a learner at that school sent Grocott's a message, alerting them to this crisis. Grocott's was able to send a reporter to investigate more deeply, bringing a dire situation to public notice.

Having got the technology in place, the next step is to link the issues to a sense of what can be done and citizen involvement.

GOING BEYOND TECHNOLOGY -- INSPIRING ACTION

For Iindaba Ziyafika, this raises a raft of questions about the limits of "conventional" journalism, the nature of developmental journalism (or journalism for development) and, indeed, about the very paradigms in which journalism is practiced. What is becoming clear is that South African media have to find ways to go beyond just raising the issues, towards framing issues and challenging people to make choices.

Part of the answer to increased participation may lie in more vigorous journalism that is committed to exposing and explaining issues in ways that make more sense to ordinary people and which invite reaction and participation.

What are the main issues in local government? What decisions have to made and when? Where can people participate and what choices are there? Can we enlarge the set of options we need to choose from?

If local media is not going help answer these questions, who will do it? Political parties and organs of participation -- such as ratepayers associations and community crime forums -- don't generally do a good job of this, for various reasons. Indeed, they very often rely on the media to help them make sense of the issues.

A good example of this was a report in Grocott's Mail that the municipality had decided to spend R800,000 on new traffic lights at a critical road junction. This sparked debate in the newspaper's letters page, with some contributions coming through the Nika-based SMS line, about alternative plans the council may not have considered, including the creation of a pedestrian-only area in the center of town.

Grocott's Mail provided a venue and facilitated a live discussion among citizens that examined various proposals. It ran stories about a previous (disastrous) attempt to do the same thing years ago, something the council did not seem aware of.

Underlying much of this is a clash between generally poor pedestrians and their needs and wealthier car-drivers. This seemingly simple issue raised issues around creating a common interest as well as a solution that would be to the greatest good for the greatest number of people.

But despite its new level of involvement, the newspaper's coverage highlighted what is generally lacking in civic news in South Africa: the news was about a decision already made. In addition to being about a fait accompli, the news itself was presented neutrally: It was left entirely up to citizens to write in with the new idea of the pedestrian mall.

How can we think about this differently in the future? The paper and the website could have, for example, run a poll on people's views, or framed alternative choices. In an area where unemployment is above the 50% mark, surely the R800,000 could be put to better use creating jobs: having humans direct traffic is a venerable African tradition.

At a local level, there is a strong case that the job of newspapers and their websites should be to alert people in advance about choices to be made, to help frame issues and explain what is at stake. Or is that an abrogation of conventional journalism's neutral "we'll call it the way we see it, and nothing more" approach?

GETTING JOURNALISTS AND CITIZENS INVOLVED

My view is that without the media making initial sense of what is at issue, of where and when interventions could be made and what the possible choices are, the feared decline in popular participation in decision-making is more likely to come true.

To make a difference, Grocott's, particularly in its most recent online reincarnation, is going to work much more actively to identify upcoming issues of importance to citizens and create forums, through cell phones, that alert people not just to issues, but also to their options in terms of those issues. Otherwise, we run the risk of being disempowering, rather than inspiring.

Doing these kinds of things will require a great effort by journalists and citizen journalists to interpret and explain issues. And there will be a related greater effort to reflect on opinions and even gather those opinions using cell phone-based technology.

To this end, Grocott's will look at ways of alerting citizens to critical issues well in advance of decisions about them. Online, we'll run more polls and SMS voting lines. As importantly, will work out new ways to ensure that decision-makers know what the results are of all these efforts. Hopefully they'll pay heed to what their constituents' views are (and if they don't, we'll let the public know that).

It will also be important to work more closely with other media channels, such as community radio, and it may even be necessary to create more spaces for meetings and maybe even step into the realm of calling meetings.

By doing all of this, Grocott's and Iindaba Ziyafika will continue to be a laboratory for the fusing of new technology and a fresh approach to framing issues and motivating public response and participation. We have to demonstrate better ways for the public to get involved in local democracy.

If successful, the model might be replicated all over South Africa and further afield, and be able to make a contribution to better governance in South Africa and Africa. It will allow us, to extend the bowling metaphor, to arrive at the bowling alleys together and to play the same game. But the first step is working out what that game is.

Once we've done that, we're on the path to talking to each other about solutions.

Even in the Iindaba Ziyafika project, our Knight funded expansion of the public sphere in Grahamstown City, we're focused on getting citizen journalism in via text (in particular in through SMS) and getting it back out via text. Text content for smartphones and mobile sites are huge and growing niches. But why not use voice more for citizen journalism, public debate, and just getting news teasers out?

There are already services that allow you to record a piece of audio and post it directly to the world, just as you would a video clip to YouTube. And although sites like Talkshoe and Utterli might not be the way -- certainly not from South Africa -- they might show the way. We want to build this kind of voice in/voice out technology into our Grocott's Mail online site.

Getting citizen journalism content is a real challenge here in South Africa, partly because of low levels of functional literacy, even among adults. For example, we find that with some school kids that we have trained they have great ideas and wonderful stories to tell, but struggle to write a coherent sentence! So getting user generated content content through voice and then sending it back as a piece of audio, or giving people access to a CHOICE of how they want to get their news (and their interactivity) -- text and/or audio -- may be well worth considering.

Issues of Cost and Moderation

But, of course, there are a variety of issues to consider. The biggest issue, as always, is cost. SMS is the number one cell phone based medium in Africa for a good reason: voice calls are expensive, both relative to SMS and in absolute terms.

But prices are dropping and voice is such a powerful medium that the extra cost might be worth it. Part of this power is that one does not need to be literate to record or listen to audio on a website as long as some elementary training is provided, and the steps are made easy enough. In addition, you can choose your language preference.

There is also the critical issue of moderation. Users send in an SMS story, and we can edit, add, check and then publish. If we allowed users to narrate a story directly, how could we be sure it was accurate, fair, and not defamatory?

Even simple things like restaurant reviews can be contentious. Just this week in our local newspaper, a fish shop owner was incensed by an SMS that the paper published, alleging his shop was dirty. Not only did the owner deny this, he suggested such allegations might be the work of rival shops trying to pinch his business, and, as such, the SMS might be libel!

To what extent does freedom of expression balance out with the right of people and businesses to not be unfairly bad-mouthed? This is something that would need to be worked out in practice (once some good legal advice is in place!)

Facilitating Inputs and Alerts

Clearly, we need to work out how we facilitate citizen journalist input. It could be a more powerful tool than we've ever thought. Talk radio, for example, is big in South Africa: to what extent does convergence mean that community newspaper cites could become similar to talk radio sites, featuring both interactive audio and broadcast audio?

What is exciting is the possibility of pushing audio to citizens who've signed up for something like a headline service or a specific kind of alert -- like "weather warnings" or "jam on highway" or "municipality about to pass a law" notices. Now, sure, you can send an SMS, IM, or email (for the smarter phones), but getting a voice message in your inbox still has more immediacy and own-language choice.

Arguably, a short spoken message, of, say, 30 seconds, can get a lot more across than a 160 character SMS. Voice can also convey emotion better, another way to aid meaning.

A community paper may not have the capacity for alerts, and there are a lot of technical issues to work out before something like "voice-box headlines" can be sent out in large numbers. In South Africa, callers do not pay to receive calls nor do they pay to retrieve voicemail from their voicemail boxes, so the entire exercise would be free to the user. But how would a voice headlines service be able to attract sponsorship? Could you tack on a voiced "brought to by" before or after (or both) to your audio headlines?

Equally important are the tech issues. One can send out 10,000 SMS messages or emails virtually simultaneously, but with voice, each voice box must be dialed, the pre-recorded message heard, and the message laid down.

We're thinking about what kind of dialer could do this and investigating the possible costs.

Of course, there are those who say voicemail is dead but they are talking about peer-to-peer voicemail, not professionally produced, user requested, sharp, snappy sets of headlines that really fill you in on what is happening around your town exactly when you want it (as opposed to waiting for radio news on the hour for example). Maybe that difference makes it appealing enough for people to sign up and dial in for.

Does anyone know of newspapers using pushed out headline audio on cell phones? Or ways of getting citizen journalism in through audio recordings? Plenty of papers will send you SMS headline menus that invite you to log into the newspaper website, but how many, if any, are sending out audio headlines that entice you to log on, or even to buy a paper copy? And are payment issues different: Do you have to pay to receive calls, or retrieve voice mail in your country?

We're hoping to conduct our first push audio headline experiments in July this year, so watch (or listen if we get it right) to this space for more.

And is the prospect of being more "in the know," and more connected and more involved in one's community, attractive enough to inspire people to take the time out to do citizen journalism?

The old adage that "all news is local" does hold a great deal of truth. News can be locally generated or outside news can be made local. The implications of any big news story - like H1N1 virus, a.k.a. swine flu - can almost always be localized to create stories about how this impacts on you, where you are right now.

You might want to know about local stocks of anti-virals, and you would certainly be interested if the hospital near you started treating cases. In fact you'd probably be unhappy not knowing.

But "big story localized" is not what we mean when we talk of hyper-local. We usually mean something that emanates out of a defined geography. Benedict Anderson theorized the idea of "imagined communities" in the 1980s, providing us with a powerful way of understanding nationalism and group identity. We live in collectives like nation states that are so big that we can't know everyone face-to-face, and we have to build a collectively imagined (but often contested) set of ideas of what such a community looks like, what it stands for, and what value we place on belonging to it.

But in small geographic areas, like a school, or a city block, we don't have to imagine our community as much. Or do we? We live right in it, even if we don't know everyone in it. It is much more face-to-face, and in many ways, there is less need for it to be imagined.

Hyper-local coverage is about locality, build around a boxed-in closeness and a physical terrain. We are interested in knowing more about what is going here because it is literally where we are at -- so the thinking goes.

How the Local Paper Fits In

But there is also an argument to be made that we are interested local news because it allows us to imagine relationship with our space, and other people in it. We've seen just this week, with the 140th anniversary of the local community newspaper, Grocott's Mail (an essential component of our Knight News Challenge Iindaba Ziyafika project), just how central a local paper's reporting is to how people think about themselves. It is about how to make sense of geographically-based location in relation to other people living there.

With South Africa's history of division, and of rigid apartheid of geographical space, building a new sense of community-hood and nation-hood is clearly a very important social task. Contributing to this is a big part of our overarching objectives.

In Grahamstown, South Africa, we have a perfect laboratory to test what works and doesn't work in hyper-local media and journalism. But there are dangers when areas of greatest likely interest to those who live here -- say a few square kilometers around where people live or work, or your school or campus dorm -- still largely reflect the segregation of apartheid-era social planning.

Might hyper-local in this context not simply reinforce ethnic and class ghettos, only slightly less strongly formed now, even though all legal compulsions have been removed?

This week, we're starting our training for what will eventually be a dozen local school "cell phone media clubs." Young volunteers with an interest in making a difference in their communities through learning to use and make media will learn about digging up and reporting interesting stories, both in their schools and in their communities. Building on the work of the 2008 class, we'll be focusing on getting the news in to a central point -- Grocott's website and even into the Grocott's print edition -- primarily via SMS.

But in 2009, we're channeling a lot of energy into creating something like a school newsletter as a basic building block for getting into the swing of hyper-local journalism. In South Africa, better-off schools have weekly newsletters. They are mostly filled with sports news, but also carry some cultural and club activity, and sometimes news of a new teacher arriving, or an old one leaving, for example.

Poorer schools often don't have these kind media channels, and that might be why in many poorer schools there seems to be a greater sense of distance between parents and the schools their children attend.

Might being able to read about what is happening at the school make parents feel more involved, or maybe want to be more involved? Do they play a role in helping people connected to the school -- parents, teachers, learners, families, communities -- imagine a particular role and relationship to that school. And, if they do (we think they do), how can they help everyone take a great stand for improving educational and life experiences in these schools?

Basic Training

Getting practical, cell phone media club members are going to get some fun basic training and then they going to choose news beats. Someone is going to be responsible for reporting on the debate club, or the chess club, or the football team. There will also be social news, "what's on," and opinion pieces. They're all going to write short stories and take photos on their cell phones.

These highly local school-based news will then be edited professionally, and appear on Grocott's Mail Online and sometimes in Grocott's print edition. Our first examples should be up and running in June.

We are also finding ways of getting this news and information back to schools that often don't have much access to the Internet (and, indeed, few computers for any purpose). We are going to use SMS, Mxit and Facebook to do this, once we've built that capacity, and figured out ways to pay for it, but we're also going to make print-outs on big A3 sheets and paste them up in a specially designated "news wall" at each school.

Combination of old and new media channels, but suited for purpose.

We're taking this approach even though some voices within and outside our project are asking: "is this journalism or just information provision?" Is allowing schools to report on their sports results, on a public website, really journalism?

Our view is that getting learners reporting about things that are important to them will generate, on its own, a whole range of topics we've not even thought about, some of which might have greater social import then say, a soccer score.

But starting with sports scores (and match reports) or news of the School's choir's performance at the regional choir competitions, for example, and with other very (hyper) local news, is a great way to build audience rapport and reporting skills. In any case, who's to judge what social import is, if not the communities and schools themselves?

Over time, we'll add instant messaging, twitter and Facebook feeds, so that these spaces can be updated consistently. We're also looking at providing public information, where available -- like a school's graduation rates -- on the site.

Contentious Issues at Schools

Watch this space: Schools in South Africa are sensitive places and we're faced with a huge range of interesting issues that arise simply from having a space to report about what's happening, not matter how banal that might appear to some in the first place. Just posting graduation rates can cause controversy for example; many schools are not proud of their achievements and with good reason.

And other issues can be equally contentious: for example, recently, some pupils (or learners as we like to call them in South Africa) expressed some critical views about the dominance of rugby football at local high schools (because the rugby authorities make money available to promote the sport at grassroots level), as opposed to ordinary football (soccer) which is hugely popular in South Africa.

Some of the school teachers were very upset to be criticized in this way. How will we handle this kind of issue? How do we support our learner citizen journalists to do their jobs, but also how do we stay out of it, and just let it happen?

Schools are in fact, hugely contested places. In the current set of newsletters that we are looking at -- from wealthier schools in Grahamstown -- you see all sorts of power relationships leaking out. Boys' sport is often given more prominence compared to girls' sport, for example. What's that all about? How do we make sure we don't inadvertently reinforce a whole bunch of gender stereotypes, to cite just one area of obvious contestation?

We are clearly going to have very interesting issues come up simply by creating the space, and providing some skills and resources, for school-based hyper-local reporting.