Suzy Bell: In your ear
It’s hard not to be impressed with East Coast Radio’s Newswatch team what with the catchy effervescence of the station’s news manager, Mary Papayya.
When the station went commercial in May last year, Papayya was snapped up from the SABC where she served as an executive producer at Radio Lotus. She has given the news on East Coast a dose of freshness in the short months they have had to set up a news operation from scratch.
There’s a scent of CNN immediacy in Newswatch with its get-it-first edge, which is the beauty of live on-the-spot reporting. They also, at last, reflect all communities in KwaZulu Natal.
Its up-to-the-minute hard-hitting news, top-quality actuality and bias for events in KwaZulu-Natal creates a highly credible combination that makes the programme the leader on the local news front. Weekly listenership figures for Newswatch are at 596 000.
A feature of its news programmes is that the team of six journalists plus the news editor write and read their own bulletins.
Papayya is chuffed that the listeners are excited by the fact that the programme has correspondents in “every corner of the earth, from rural KwaZulu-Natal to Gauteng, Cape Town, Africa, the States, Europe and Asia. We pride ourselves on being first with the news wherever it happens. We have set in place new styles and methods of presenting our listeners with the most immediate, relevant and credible news – first!”
Papayya punts “A creative variety of individual voices and styles and a critical reflection of the dynamics and the colourful strand of Kwazulu-Natal and South Africa today.”
The news team has shed the old-style radio reporting where official sources like police spokesmen were the main conveyers of news They’ve replaced it with those “voices at the coal-face: the detective who makes the arrest; the eye-witness who saw the tragedy; the victim at the end of the big story or the newsmakers themselves”.
Going commercial has given the news team the opportunity (and the resources) “to look beyond the given”, says Papayya. This forward-thinking news editor feels it’s about “Taking the initiative. Being more innovative. Take the Swedish murders [two tourists were killed in their Umhlanga Rocks hotel room] recently. We phoned Sweden and we swopped vital information. We could have run it as a sensational murder, but we didn’t.”
Newswatch stays with its stories and provides listeners with regular follow-ups. The Newswatch team, for example, contacted the owner of the resort where the couple were murdered to ask if there was any effect on their business. It’s this edge that puts even some of the print media in Durban to shame.
East Coast Radio Newswatch bulletins are on the hour with headlines every half-hour. There is a wrap of the news every day, Monday to Sunday at 5:30 pm, on 94,95 FM in Durban and surrounds