Last week was World Press Freedom Day on May 3 — a good occasion to create and share some cool online research tools about South African media. There are 10 listed below, ranging in complexity as you read. But spending 30 minutes on getting to grips with them now could save you days’ worth of online search time in the future. True.

The digital divide just got much deeper. This disruptive update comes from a recent conference in Texas that underlined how fast the information environment is changing abroad. For a start, and similar to the way TV became the killer attraction for audiences in the old media world, video is now conquering the web where there is a critical mass of broadband users.

Shortly before this past weekend’s world summit on children’s media in Johannesburg, the African National Congress (ANC) released a policy discussion document on media. This coincidence turned out to be a contrast — high hopes from the summit; a real let-down by the ruling party.

Have the media been riding a crime wave, or have they been creating it? And what part should the press play? In the government’s view, crime coverage is either misplaced or making mischief (akin to First National Bank). Officials believe the press is playing up perceptions that the state is unwilling or unable to stop the scourge.

People say it will be a hard act to follow John Perlman and Nikiwe Bikitsha, the departing hosts of AM Live — probably South Africa’s most influential radio programme. I’ll especially miss Nikiwe’s easy calm and John’s earnest passion (though not the latter’s ”fahn and mald” pronunciation when reading the weather!).

If being a journalist is a species of voyeurism, then reading books about the exploits of journalists isn’t much different. But in the coincidence of two recent books by different South African journalists, you feel relieved that yours is only a second-hand taste of what they’ve seen.

Nigeria’s proscriptive broadcast policy means that Africa’s most populous country has only one community radio station. By contrast, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has 192. These are some of the facts in what is probably the most comprehensive study done to date of the African media.

A glimpse was given last week of South Africa’s digital broadcast future — and of the wrangles about who might control it. The somewhat fuzzy picture came in via a 350-page report by a task force set up by the government and called the digital broadcasting migration working group (WG).

Here’s an idea that could break the polarisation around the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) — indeed, a mechanism for the broadcaster to get out the corner into which it has painted itself over the blacklisting saga. To take a leaf from the New Partnership for Africa’s Development book, how about a peer-review system for African state-owned broadcasters, the SABC included?

The South African National Editors’ Forum (Sanef) turned 10 last week — on October 19, a noteworthy date that is also the anniversary of the banning of two national newspapers in 1977. What makes this significant is that Sanef is an amazing, even perplexing, phenomenon.