It’s rather odd to be interviewing one’s former boss. Anton Harber was one of the founding co-editors of this newspaper, then The Weekly Mail, in 1985. (I joined the paper in 1989.) Seventeen years later, he is heading up the journalism programme at the University of the Witwatersrand’s Graduate School for the Humanities and Social Sciences. I spoke to him and to Lesley Cowling, also a onetime colleague; among other things, she ran the training programme at the Mail & Guardian for several years. She is now academic coordinator of the Wits journalism programme.
In such circumstances, I, more usually a reviewer of books and movies, felt I should make sure my journalistic technique was impeccable. But I had forgotten to check the batteries in my tape recorder, and I had brought a notebook other than the one in which I had jotted down a few questions, so I felt I’d better compensate by going straight to a hard question.
You have no training as a journalist, I said to Harber, yet here you’re heading a programme that trains journalists. How does this work?
He laughed. “If I wasn’t being trained at my six months at the Springs Advertiser, I don’t know what I was doing there. I was just thrown straight into it. In my first week, I covered a family murder in Springs, which got on to the front page. It was written with Christina Pretorius, who was the chief reporter.
“I have no formal academic journalism training, but the basic approach we’re taking is that journalists need to be trained by journalists. The other thing is that the profession has changed in 20 years and it demands a different level of skill and training that makes a university degree much more appropriate.
“My role really is to develop a programme that facilitates all sorts of people teaching all sorts of other people. If it was up to me to do all the teaching clearly it would be inadequate. There are certain things I can teach effectively, but critical to the way we’re operating is to look to constantly bring in experienced working journalists to teach what they’re best at. So we will have a core of full-time teachers, but in fact the bulk of our teaching will be done by working journalists.”
Also assisting on the programme is Dr Tawana Kupe, formerly of Rhodes University, who runs Wits’s undergraduate media studies programme and, at the School for the Humanities, supervises master’s degrees and teaches theory and research methodology. Also involved are journalists Jo-Anne Richards, Franz Kruger and Hugh Lewin, and other faculties contribute: for instance, the faculty of law will run a course on media law and ethics. Guest lecturers in the seminar series have included Tim Modise, Max du Preez, Jon Qwelane, John Perlman and Michael Gavshon of the American news programme 60 Minutes. Experts in fields such as television and advertising will be brought in when needed.
A postgraduate degree like this one is somewhat different from the undergraduate courses taught at universities such as Rhodes, and some way from the traditional cadet courses that used to teach journalists their skills in a hands-on way, on an actual newspaper. What does Harber’s course do that ordinary cadet courses don’t?
“In your traditional cadet course,” he says, “you can teach basic skills, but if you combine that with the academy you’re teaching a whole range of other skills, critical thought, analysis and the wider range of knowledge that journalism today needs. So to me the ideal training combines those two things — very practical, very hands-on, but also the critical thinking that gives life to journalism.”
As for an undergraduate journalism degree, Harber points out: “You focus mostly on media studies and the like. I would argue that you need a broad range of intellectual skills as a foundation. That’s a combination that’s really needed.”
And Cowling adds: “We take graduates who have already managed to deal with some of the fundamentals of thinking and writing. They’ve got the background and the context, and at that point we try to turn them into journalists.”
But not everyone on the course is a graduate aiming to become a journalist. There are many in the programme who are working journalists already.
“We’re not teaching them entry-level journalism,” says Harber. “We’re helping them expand their skills, increase their knowledge, help them move into new media. A big surprise for me has been how much hunger there is among working journalists for further study, both practical and theoretical. The number of students applying to do our course is way above our expectations.”
The sociology of news is the kind of subject that is of immense use to mid-career journalists, says Cowling. This focus is “issue-driven and critical, looking at journalism and society. Of the 20 students on that course, 12 are working journalists, and they really took to it. There was none of this ‘What’s this boring theory?’ stuff. It made a lot of sense to them because they are asking what journalism should be, how this relates to advertising; they are grappling with issues of governance, and so on. It’s amazing how motivated and engaged people have been.”
“They are great students because they know what they want,” says Harber. “They’re dedicated, they’re committed. What’s great is that in our classes are everyone from a 20-year-old new graduate through to a fortysomething person who’s been in journalism for 20 years, but who may in fact have no degree. So it’s a very rich mix, and teaching a class like that is just fantastic. It’s hard, because you’re dealing with people with different levels of experience, but it’s lively and dynamic.”
There are about 60 students in the programme at present. Cowling points out that about 40 of those are part-time, and of those about 30 are working journalists. The course does not have to be swallowed whole; it can be approached on a course-by-course basis for journalists who can’t devote themselves entirely to a university course.
“At career entry-level,” says Harber, “we’re keeping to small numbers, because the industry needs quality not quantity. We don’t need a flood of new journalists; what we need are very good, very skilled journalists. That’s very clearly our focus, and I’m convinced the postgraduate model is absolutely right. You’ve got to have a good grounding in a general education, or one that specialises in, say, economics. You’ve got to have something to say before you learn how to say it.”
So the programme balances theory and practice. As Harber says: “The practice is focused on basic skills — writing for the media. But there are different levels, such as the master’s level, where we’d teach a higher level of skill for working journalists. We’re looking for a 50/50 mix of practice and theory. But there is no doubt that people who finish our course must be able to operate effectively in newsrooms. That’s the bottom line. But without the 50% of theory that makes them understand the context, they will not be effective journalists.”
I wonder about the programme’s apparent bias toward print journalism. Is this a good basis for a broader application of journalistic skills?
Yes, says Cowling. “If we have somebody coming to us with a BA or a BComm, and they want the honours year to basically go out and become a journalist, they will do two practical courses. What we’ve found with those courses is that although they are in fact quite print-oriented, there are core skills such as understanding what a story is, or structuring and writing skills, that translate to other media. We are trying to teach core skills.”
To which writing is central. Even if you’re going to end up on talk radio, I would imagine, some basic language skills will help. And, of course, the more you know about the world in general and the media in this country in particular the more likely you are to be a good journalist. Areas of study on Harber and Cowling’s programme include history of the media in South Africa and issues such as ownership; options are available for those who want to expand beyond print media and are looking at outlets such as the Internet or television.
Still, Harber’s vision for the programme goes beyond even that. “Teaching is obviously our core business,” he says, “but we’re also looking to create a centre for research, debate and discussion. I think there’s a need for a lot more of that, for crucial debates around media and journalism, where it’s going, and the research that goes with it. That takes the form of seminars and various activities, as well as our website, which we’re creating as a teaching tool but also as a resource for the profession. Because of where Wits is located, it can play an important role in providing the space and the resources for a centre for activity and debate about the profession.”