Wrapped in a blanket, sitting near the heater, a steamy mug of hot chocolate in one hand and the other resting on the armrest your favourite chair — what could be better to beat the bleak chills of winter? Other than experiencing the National Arts Festival from Grahamstown in the comfort of your own home at the same time, that is.
Grahamstown’s local online news site, Grocott’s Mail, has teamed up with Cue, the official National Arts Festival newspaper, as well as South African video-sharing website MyVideo, to launch an online video channel with a range of content produced during the festival, which began on Thursday.
The video content, covering all aspects of the National Arts Festival, is recorded and posted on the site by students from Rhodes University’s New Media Lab. The channel will be updated regularly, providing internet users all over the globe with an opportunity to view the proceedings of the festival.
Rowan Polovin, MyVideo’s CEO, said: ”MyVideo is excited at the opportunity to take the National Art Festival beyond Grahamstown and, via the internet, into homes throughout South Africa as well as the rest of the world.”
He was pleased that the organisers of the channel elected to use his site as a platform.
As well as benefiting both viewers and performers, the showcasing of these videos ”forms part of the New Media students’ formal journalism education experience that prepares them to operate across digital platforms and converged newsroom environments”, said Jude Mathurine, head of the New Media Lab at Rhodes.
The National Arts Festival channel, with its range of video content from reviews to episodic items, is not the only source of web-based media available to the public.
Print, radio, TV and design journalism students have collaborated with ICT reporters from across Africa, as well as trainers from The Netherlands, to create a blog, a festival news and information website and a mobile blog for citizen reporting.
As the programme of the festival becomes more varied year after year, so does its coverage, thus allowing for a scale of information to reach not only those at the (notoriously freezing) festival itself, but internet users in the comfort of their own homes.