Media Freedom in SA

brad — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 10:20:02 +0200

Vincent pointed out an interesting post about tabloid journalism by Yfm's current CEO Kanthan Pillay. While I had a urination yesterday in one of ablution facilities in the African Media Matrix I noticed a fantastic quote (the bathrooms are littered with quotes and pretty pictures, in fact, by the CSHons rating scale I would give them an 8/10, they lose out because the hand driers are dismal). The quote looks like this (you can also scroll over the image, or click to make it big): It is a quote from Professor Francis Kasoma (a media academic) from 1997:

"Even the little freedom of the press which many independent newspapers are enjoying may be drastically curtailed if they continue to flout the basic ethics of journalism. When this happens the irresponsible independent press will be as much to blame as the governments taking the draconian measures"

Cue Cue Cue

brad — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 18:16:11 +0200

I have spent a good portion of the last three weeks working on a Drupal based news site for running Cue Online. I am very happy with the results (but there are more features needed!!). Drupal for the win hey...It has been a good learning experience. I have set it up to handle podcasts and embedded video (hosted by myvideo). I dig the fact that it looks reasonable in a cellphone browser (just because of sensible html ;). We have been populating the website with content from the cue newspaper, content from the CueTV crew, and podcasts from the CueRadio team. Our students are gathering content, and we have some guests from all over africa (part of HANA), and the Netherlands (not the place between a person's legs, but the place in europe that some call Holland) in the form of students and staff from the Utrecht School of Journalism. They are also running a blog called FestivalBlog. My favourite aspect is the daily lunch post.