When culture meets media, interesting things happen. A provincial premier gets pictured in bed; a bunch of fortysomething journos stage a reunion; and innovative publishing technology gets deployed.
It’s festival time in Grahamstown again — the 30th edition of an event that’s always like a first time. It is made possible by, among others, a healthy grant from the Eastern Cape government, whose Premier Nosima Balindlela was previously the province’s arts and culture minister.
Recently in the national news for kicking off her days with 4am meetings, she’s now taking a break at the festival. To her great credit, she’s injected funds into starting 800 bed and breakfasts in the township — and she’s staying in one over the week.
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| Sitting pretty: Premier Nosima Balindlela. (Photograph: Stephen Penney) |
Pictured in the local Grocott’s Mail, she’s sitting cosy in bed, cup of tea in her lap, confessing: ”It’s 11 o’clock and I’m still in my pyjamas. This is heaven.”
It’s a Reconstruction and Development Programme house without hot water or a bathroom. In Grahamstown’s infamous winter. Hey, where else in the world would you find a government leader as embedded, literally, with the masses and as open to media scrutiny?
The fest has also been reunion time for ex-students of Rhodes University’s journalism school (of which I’m head). Their gathering marks the university’s centenary celebrations. The galaxy of grads since 1970 includes Johncom CEO Connie Molusi, Business Day editor Peter Bruce, Financial Mail editor Caroline Southey and a host of other bylines, voices and front-of-camera faces.
At the gathering, Molusi announced a R4,5-million contribution towards a new home for the journalism school — a new facility costing R24-million and called the Africa Media Matrix. But the occasion was not pure celebration: he also described the painful experiences at Rhodes in the 1970s and 1980s.
In those days, black students needed special permits to enrol. Initially, they were excluded from campus accommodation and later ghetto-ised in a blacks-only residence. Their political suss and multilingualism counted for little. It was a hard slog in a conservative white environment.
Appropriately, the reunion also saw the launch of 10 scholarships sponsored by past and present students and aimed at expanding access for township scholars.
Meanwhile, new media technology was hard at work at the festival. There is a home-grown content management system (CMS) developed by Vincent Maher of the journalism department’s new media lab. It coordinates the efforts of 120 students (including Zambians and Ugandans) who are producing content for six different media outlets.
The aggregated results can be seen at xanni.ru.ac.za, which showcases the stories made for:
- CueTV (also going out via SABC Africa);
- CueRadio (SAFM also broadcasts the feed);
- Cue newspaper (the daily paper sold at the festival);
- Cuewire news agency (content is also carried on
SABCNews.com);
- Cuepix (photo agency, also at cuepix.ru.ac.za); and
- Cuemultimedia (which will culminate in a DVD).
Most of these elements are automated to go on to the Xanni website as soon as they are finalised in their respective newsrooms. It makes for a self-compiling, spontaneously updating, singing-dancing, web-based wonder.
Underpinning all this is an intriguing workflow system whereby at any given moment, a Cue content manager can monitor progress in writing, editing, photography or design.
Here’s the sinister side to it all: the CMS also monitors who is late with deadlines and the average turnaround time between the submission of stories and the completion of editing. Tantamount to Taylorist techniques in journalism?
Actually, it need not be a data-armed Big Brother breathing down the necks of the content producers. For instance, it may be that lateness lies not with the individual writer or producer concerned, but with editors’ poor estimation of deadlines.
But wherever the problem lies, the system over time will compile a profile of average patterns of productivity. These can serve as benchmarks for predicting performance and estimating staffing levels.
What’s also made possible through this system is a comparison between first and last versions, enabling editors to track where gremlins may have slipped in or facts been taken out.
It’s just the beginning. Other kinds of ”data mining” functions can be built into future versions of the CMS: