This might be the final post

I finished my articles on Thursday. The site was nearly done but for some bugs. My supervisors will fix those. We then had our journalism class party. I finished my mini essay today and handed it in.

here it is:

Essay:

The lessons that I have learned from the Jukskei river project (Jukskei project) about how to be a successful and valuable investigative journalist have been very useful. Unfortunately, the website is not as I envisaged it to be. This is mainly due to what the supervisors were able to do and poor planning on the students’ part. However, that the journalism students and their supervisors have created a site that may be less advanced than they wished for, but one that delivers in-depth journalism to its audience.

The project confirmed it is important to use honest, reliable sources. These resources must be used with time constraints in mind. A source can be useful when it gives you background information but soon it needs to justify the time you spend with it by giving you enough specific information that you can use for your story.

You need to predict how much cross-checking with other sources the information needs. If the cross-checking would appear to take too long, you would be better off to search for another source or to change the focus of that part of the story.

It was a challenge to have such assumedly well-informed sources. I used Paul Fairall, chairman of the Jukskei River Catchment Management Forum, and Marian Laserson, an environmentalist who has worked with him. When I tried to evaluate their information’s credibility by asking potential leads if they had information about the Jukskei project, I was told that Fairall and Laseron were experts on things related to the Jukskei river and they would be able to help me.

I acquired information not related to my group’s topic. Most of it was passed along to other groups. We were warned many overlaps would occur.

About halfway through the project, it seemed that everyone in my group had been gaining the information they needed and receiving fairly distributed attention from sources.

One group member who had contact details and a relationship with sources that could help me, did not invite me to talk to them or even make me aware of their existence. She only did so when the website production stage was nearly finished. This was not necessarily intentional.

I hope I did not do anything similar. All people working in groups on investigative projects need to balance their will to succeed as individuals and as a group.





I became more confident with interviewing people. Group dynamics influenced my individual output here too. Initially I let some of the people in my group gain too much attention from subjects. I think this was because I wanted everyone to feel comfortable working with me. Soon, however, I made an effort to gain what I wanted from the subjects.

The Power Reporting conference taught me how to use Internet search tools effectively. I learned how to attain more specific results from the search engine, Google, and how to look at websites’ archives.

Regarding assessing the topic, my group’s finished articles do not necessarily immediately relate to it.

However, the supervisors accepted that overlapping of subject areas across the groups would occur. If not that many of my group’s stories can be related to the river’s past, they can be related to what the state of the river will be in the future.

My main articles were profiles on Fairall and Laserson. These two are of few people who rehabilitate and protect the Jukskei river. I also wrote a sidebar profile on the person who could be seen as their forerunner in terms of their relationship to the Jukskei, Wendy Bodman.

I struggled to find information about her. She had passed away and I could not find any records of her family in phonebooks or on the internet. I assumed her children emigrated from South Africa, do not list their phone numbers, or, if female, took their husbands’ surnames.

Eventually I came into email contact with South Africa newspaper, The Star’s writer, James Clarke. He has been heavily involved in environmental pursuits in South Africa. He co-founded the Endangered Wildlife Trust and, in 1981, spearheaded the campaign to stop mining in the Kruger National Park. I requested more information about Bodman from him but he has only given me a phone number to contact him on, recently, after the project has been completed.

Laserson gave me a lot of information about herself for her profile. I should have spoken to her family members personally, though. I could have emailed her sons living in Australia.

Noticeably, I did not get to ask many personal questions of Laserson to her face, because other group members were asking her about details of their stories simultaneously. Thankfully, she responded to all my emails

Fairall did not respond to any of the emails I sent him. I had to use Wits’ phone cards to speak with him on his cell-phone number. He does not have an office or home phone land line.

There were usually phone cards available. It would have been nice to have been told about the extra code for the department’s second phone sooner in the project than in the second last week.

Fairall invited me to a braai at his house; where I learned about his personal life and history.

My main multimedia piece was supposed to involve the litter trap at Bezuidenhout Valley Park in eastern Johannesburg. The trap collects litter and sewage. I wanted to report how Edmund Sibisi, the security guard and operator spends his days at work. I realised this could have been seen as another profile. I also planned to create a video showing how he operates the litter trap. This would be embedded into Stevie-Mae Kruger, one of my group member’s stories.

I had to rely on the transport of others to get to sources and filming locations. I do not have access to a car and public transport is limiting in terms of where its routes are.

Due to my reliance on group members for transport but also how economical it was for people to cover different stories or varying aspects of the same story at the same venue or by using the same car journey, I went to the litter trap with Kruger, as she was writing about it. This made it more difficult for me to plan what “shots” I needed on film and how I would achieve them.

In video journalism, professionals often recommend that journalists conduct reconnaissance visits of subjects. The first of two visits to the trap effectively became a reconnaissance trip. Kruger was working to acquire the information needed to write her story, which prevented me from filming shots that suited my audience in terms of visual composition and content.

Thankfully, Kruger also needed to return to the trap for a second visit, to gain some information for her story. She was prepared to be directed in the shots I constructed. However, she did not always take into account how she may have been disrupting some of my shots by moving at the incorrect time or by speaking too quickly or interrupting some of Edmund’s answers with more questions or her opinions.

Also, Sibisi does not speak English particularly well. He therefore did not understand my or Kruger’s questions completely. When asked about his religious life and how he said that he did his work for “God”, he thought he was being asked to describe his garden. He also changed the subject often when answering specific questions.

Since it was so difficult to edit the footage concerning Sibisi, the video piece about him was of a standard too low for what I felt this website deserved. The piece about how the trap works was made more understandable by a longer editing process and subtitles. It was very challenging to write the subtitles as I did not always understand what Sibisi was saying.

Another group member, Katharine Child, invited me to film a piece on the LifeStraw; a device that an organisation wanted to distribute to Africa’s poor so that they could make dirty water completely drinkable.

Andrew Squire from VerticalLife would show that the device worked by drinking from the Jukskei river personally. I did not understand that she wanted me to interview him on camera as she wanted the video to be humorous and she felt I had an ability to be funny on camera.

I, however, had more experience operating the camera. Ultimately, I filmed the piece and asked many of the questions and Child filmed me doing “solo to-camera work” at a pond at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits).

We agreed the byline of the piece would be mine and that she had her main multimedia piece already. Then, supervisor Mayers explained to me that the piece on Sibisi’s day was substandard. I decided to elect the piece about the LifeStraw as my main multimedia work.

The LifeStraw piece has its own challenges. Filming Squire drink was difficult because he was moving from a standing to a kneeling to a higher-kneeling position. The camera is small and one needs extremely steady hands to avoid shakiness. The journalism department at the University of the Witwatersrand does not have tripods for its students either. I was also having to navigate through the Jukskei river, whilst holding the camera as still as possible in both hands, conceptualise shots in my head and then film them with Squire moving around.

I could not undertake a reconnaissance mission first because Squire was unavailable. He was even in a rush to go away on holiday while I wanted to film him.

I lacked in editing experience. Final Cut software would have made editing easier as it has more capability than iMovie software. More available Apple Macintosh computers would have ensured supervisors could view drafts sooner and hence more, higher quality drafts, could have been created.

I believe and Child agrees that it is easier to edit radio than video pieces. Hence, I question if the two media will be marked, taking into account this difference.

With respect to the final Juskei project website, supervisors made promises that were not met. After being instructed to study websites to learn about the value of their multimedia functions, we had very limited say in how we wanted the website or our respective group pages to appear. We had roughly thirty minutes to conceptualise and convey our wants to the web designers. They also were often unable to create many things we requested in the proposals.

The project was slowed down by other obstacles too. A class of 17 people was expected to use two Apple Macs. This was when the supervisors were not using them.

I am happy with my group’s title page on the website. I would have liked to have had more interactivity, including images like “exploded” into bigger sizes when the user’s cursor was placed over it. I believe that, bearing in mind the web developers’ skills, the page my group conceptualised and designed with them was impressive. I like the simple layout of pictures and story blurbs.

The rest of the groups’ title pages are of a similar standard. The other groups were promised that they could place some sort of pattern under their basic story and picture layout.

The one group did receive a map on its page but it was a visually simple drawing. The other group does not have the spider webs, the members requested, drawn on their page. The overall website entrance page features a nice “moving map”. This is thanks to, to my knowledge, work by supervisor Mayers.

However, I would have liked it to be more interactive. For example, if a user moved his cursor on one of the pictures, music or a voice-over could play. I fear that the page only has a moving map with a few pictures “popping up” as a user moves her mouse along it, that user may me disappointed because it did nothing else.

Other than that the website is valuable because it contains over thirty pieces of media and users can consume this media and navigate around the website with ease.

The overall degree of newsworthiness about stories about the Jukskei river is unlikely to change in a week because the river’s problems and rehabilitation projects are long-term.

But, some stories like Gangat’s piece concerning the conspiracy regarding the legality of Waterfall Estate’s operations are time-bound. If the operations are legal or not could be ascertained if, for sake of argument, sources decided not to withhold certain information, for example.

Too much time was spent on research as compared with production. Projects like this need not be longer despite how people like South African newspaper Daily Dispatch editor, Simon Trench, who has coordinated investigative projects, says one is never finished with such projects. One has to set a time limit and work within it.

Even if the project should have been planned differently and better resourced, the website met its goals of being user-friendly and informative. Further, I have learned how to improve as an investigative journalist.

Thank you to all who read this blog. Have a good 2010!