A civic engagement:

Rod Amner looks at how a small South African newspaper is managing to punch well above its weight

Deliberating the Dialogues: a critical examination of the nature and purpose of a Daily Dispatch public journalism project

This thesis critically examines the nature and purpose of a series of four town-hall-like meetings, the Community Dialogues, held in the townships and suburbs of East London, South Africa, in 2009. They were undertaken by a mainstream, commercial newspaper, the Daily Dispatch, under the banner of the worldwide public journalism movement. Following Christians et al (2009), the thesis sets out a normative framework of media performance in a democracy, including a detailed and critical normative theory of the ‘facilitative role’ proposed and developed by Haas (2007), one of the public journalism movement’s key advocate-theorists. It also draws on a variety of theoretical frameworks and perspectives in the fields of Political Studies and Media Studies to provide an analytical overview of the complex matrix of political and media contexts – at the macro (global), meso (national) and micro (local) levels – that have helped give impetus to the Community Dialogues and also shaped their ongoing operation as a public journalism strategy in the South African context. Following a critical realist case study design, the thesis goes on to provide a narrative account of the Dialogues based on in-depth interviews exploring the motivations, self-understandings and perceptions of those journalists who originated, directed and participated in this project, as well as observation of a Community Dialogue, and an examination of some of the journalistic texts related to the Dialogues. This primary data is then critically evaluated against normative theories of press performance, especially Haas’s ‘public philosophy’ of public journalism. The thesis found that apart from their undoubted success in generating a more comprehensive and representative news agenda for the newspaper, the Dialogues often fell short of Habermas’s (1989) proceduralist-discursive notion of the ‘deliberating public’, which sees citizens share a commitment to engage in common deliberation and public problem solving. This can be attributed to a number of problems, including some important theoretical/conceptual weaknesses in the Community Dialogues’ project design, the relative immaturity of the project, the domination of civil society by political society in the South African political context, and a number of organisational constraints at the Daily Dispatch. On the other hand, the newspaper’s editorial leadership has shown clear commitment to the idea of expanding the project in the future, establishing a more a more structured programme of community engagement, and nurturing a more sustainable public sphere, including the building of a more dialectical relationship between the Dialogues and civil society

Submission to Press Freedom Commission (PFC) on Media Self-regulation, Co-regulation or Statutory regulation in South Africa:

Prof Duncan has outlined the relative merits and demerits of self-regulation, co-regulation and deregulation, with which we are in broad agreement. She has also ably dealt with the three functions of regulatory bodies, namely the setting of ground rules for the industry to ensure best practice; enforcement of these; and adjudication of claims and counter claims re journalistic practice (Duncan 2012, p17). Finally, she has also taken up the issue of the necessity of accepting Third Party Complaints as one of the fundamental mechanisms by which citizens can make complaints on the basis of principle, rather than being personally aggrieved. While we are in broad agreement with her on these issues, we would like to highlight some further points for consideration

The writing is on the wall: ways that work

When I proposed to 26 third-year journalism students that our writing class take inspiration from an idea pioneered in places as unfashionable and inhospitable as the former Soviet Union and Nepal, I should have expected the icy stares. But happily, within five weeks, this winter of classroom discontent, had begun to thaw into a tentative spring of journalistic and pedagogical innovation

A tale of 2 investigations:

This is a tale of two in-depth stories, both produced by one Daily Dispatch journalist, Gcina Nstaluba, in 2009. One was wildly successful - it helped change the face of the government's housing policy and won Ntsaluba SA Story of the Year at the 2010 Mondi Shanduka Newspaper Awards. The other was deemed a dismal failure by Ntsaluba himself. Why? And what can these stories teach us and our students about doing journalism in South Africa

Film Review: Hollywood on Safari

Film Review: Hollywood on Safari

Paper bridges: a critical examination of the Daily Dispatch's ‘community dialogues’

A series of town-hall-like meetings called the ‘community dialogues’ were conducted in 2009 by the Daily Dispatch newspaper in East London, under the banner of public/civic journalism, a global journalistic reform movement begun in the United States in the late 1980s. the editorial leadership of the newspaper imagined a number of core journalistic and civic purposes for the dialogues and succeeded in achieving some of these. However, the newspaper's claim that the dialogues could help to build ‘horizontal bridges’ between diverse communities in East London is critically examined through the example of two community dialogues which took place in neighbouring locations - the predominantly white, middle-class suburb of Beacon Bay, and the informal African settlement of Nompumelelo - on consecutive days in 2009. This article argues that social inequalities, particularly acute in the South African context, may preclude the emergence of a shared vision of the common good, and that joint deliberation between diverse social groups in the pursuit of consensus may not be realistic or even an appropriate goal, especially if it means ratifying an unjust status quo

Oxford dictionary of journalism:

Tony Harcup is a self-confessed ‘hackademic’, a term which he defines in his Oxford dictionary of journalism as ‘a journalist who goes on to work in journalism education where they combine the roles of journalism (hack) and academic’ (p. 121). Harcup explains that hackademics perform this balancing act in the ‘hackademy’, a curious space within academe where journalism training intersects with Journalism Studies (a field of study which is nowadays often granted ‘upper case’ status), ‘sometimes with mutual respect and insight, sometimes with mutual suspicion and hostility’ (ibid.). And this tension is never far from the surface in many of the 1 300 definitions in this useful and absorbing dictionary