Judging a journalism competition means you get to peruse a pile of poor-quality products, but also that you are sometimes rewarded with exhilarating examples of quality work.
In the intricate field of information and communication technology (ICT) coverage, your chances of encountering the good stuff — the narratives that go beyond a geek audience — are even more challenged.
According to polemicist Jon Katz, ”technology is the biggest story in the world … there is no bigger story, no single story that more directly affects the young (or the rest of the planet), and no story more poorly or sporadically covered by journalism”.
At least in South Africa, it’s not that bad. Scattered among the sad stuff, some very good ICT journalism can be found.
This assessment came out of my recent involvement as a judge in the Telkom ICT Journalist of the Year Awards.
Telkom and its associate convener, the Institute for the Advancement of Journalism, run the competition with a panel of entirely independent judges. They include Sunday Times editor Mondli Makhanya, stockbroker Andile Mazwai, trainer Nick Worrall and ICT expert Lucy Abrahams — not forgetting a certain journalism professor based in Grahamstown.
Over the five years of this competition, some winning journalists have had entries very critical of Telkom — these are writers such as Nathi Suzaki, Marina Bidoli, Ivo Vegter and David Shapshak. It seems that Telkom feels (unsurprisingly!) big enough to live with these verdicts. For their part, the journalists feel independent enough to take the prizes from the corporation.
So what’s the winning content from the past 12 months?
The overall victor in the contest was a surprise name to the specialists in the field. The glory went to Pat McCracken from Bona magazine. She wrote about how to avoid SMS competition scams, and how to dodge the pitfalls in running a small telecoms business. Her articles did an excellent job of fulfilling the contest’s criteria of:
- being enterprising and independent;
- exhibiting thorough research; and
- explaining technology issues to her audience.
These qualities may sound simple, but very little ICT journalism exhibits all of them. Do a test yourself, next time you’re reading an ICT story.
A section winner (radio) in the competition who, like McCracken, also covered grassroots-level ICT stories was the South African Broadcasting Corporation’s Tshepo Ikaneng. His was a vivid account of community empowerment through computer access. Real people, real voices; not the rhetoric of donors and politicians.
The subject matter of such stories is far from the dramatic developments reported by the winners in other categories (mainstream press, business magazines, television and such). And dramatic developments in the ICT world were not in short supply in 2004.
A glimpse at some of the entries is a good reminder that ICT is neither a dry subject nor one with only fringe appeal.
Articles abounded that dealt in the big-big news — such as the second national operator saga; the so-called ”big bang” deregulation announced by the government; and the sale of Thintana’s share in Telkom to the Elephant consortium. Category winners such as Marina Bidoli, Phillip de Wet and Belinda Anderson covered these topics.
Other entries demonstrated that 2004 was when journalists started writing seriously about blogging and open-source software. There were the glamorous and the gory: Google’s initial public offering; Sentech and Telkom fighting off their nemesis websites; and Vodacom withdrawing from Nigeria.
Other entries conveyed 2004’s news of iBurst wireless web alternatives to wi-max and 2,5g connectivity; a new director general for the Department of Communications; Skype and voice over IP getting real; 3G on the horizon; iPods; and piracy and copyright issues.
But there were no entries covering the all-important processes of the World Summit on the Information Society convened by the United Nations through the International Telecommunications Union. Our ICT journalists are too insular, it seems.
Surprisingly, there were also very few entries about the ICT charter — reflecting perhaps, that South Africa’s ICT journalists remain overwhelmingly white and possibly struggle to build deep contacts among black ICT movers and shakers.
Also on the downside was the poor quality of a lot of entries where:
too much was superficial and uncritical reflection of press release information — particularly in cases when companies donated computers to communities;
a lot of jargon was left unexplained — Usals, vans, VOIP and more mouthfuls; and
claims about technology were made that were neither professionally tested nor properly sourced.
The weakest ICT journalism came from the community newspaper category, where the judges declined to make any award. Most television offerings generally failed to find a visual formula for effective ICT coverage.
When the competition kicked off in 2000, it attracted 33 entries. This has risen to 270 in what is now the event’s fifth year. But there are some questions about where ICT journalism will go in 2005.
Veteran ICT writer Marina Bidoli has left the profession, and Belinda Anderson is moving to report on finance. Three respected writers — Philip de Wet, David Shapshak and Robert Laing — lost their jobs when ThisDay collapsed.
In the meantime, our lives grow more and more digital, and we need journalists who can keep up with, and do justice to, this epochal story in all its facets — scientific, economic, policy, legal, human interest, cultural and developmental, to list just some.
The Telkom awards help to recognise, celebrate and highlight good practice. But with experienced folk leaving the field, serious capacity building is needed if Katz’s comments about technology coverage are not to come to pass in South Africa.