by Gill Moodie (@grubstreetSA) As the mainstream press struggles with shrinking newsrooms, and online news in this country is limited mostly to opinion writing and wire services, there is a worry that many stories are not told, especially from marginalised communities in townships and rural areas.
Into this gap has stepped the not-for-profit news organisation, GroundUp, which in turn follows in the footsteps of the long-running Health-e News started by veteran journalist Kerry Cullinan.
And despite the difficulties of surviving on donor funding, these two organisation are doing interesting and important journalism. Not only do Health-e News and GroundUp represent a completely different way of thinking about news, they are also at the forefront of solutions-based civic journalism in South Africa, training ordinary people and activists to be reporters rather than using formally trained reporters.
“In order to focus on social-justice stories, I felt we needed to work with people from the communities that we are reporting on,” GroundUp editor Nathan Geffen told Grubstreet last week. “They are mostly from working-class backgrounds and don’t have particularly great educations or haven’t necessarily been through formal journalism training. But what they lack in formal training and writing skills and the knowledge of journalism, they make up for in their contacts and the understanding they have of their communities.”
There are about 12 people (also counting regular freelancers) reporting for the Cape Town-based GroundUp, which was started in April 2012 as a joint project of Community Media Trust and the University of Cape Town’s Centre for Social Science Research to provide news from the city’s townships.
It makes its stories available to the mainstream media – such as the Mail & Guardian and Daily Maverick – under Creative Commons licence and publishes them on its website.
Working with journalists who lack formal training means that there is a lot of editing, says Geffen. “There’s a lot of to-and-fro and the stories take a bit longer to put together but I think we make up for it by producing stories that are really interesting and important.”
Health-e, which was started in 1999 and which has offices in Johannesburg and Cape Town, has one of the largest and most successful civic journalism programmes in the country.
Started in 2010 “on the smell of an oil rag”, the OurHealth programme is now funded by Making All Voices Count and the DG Murray Trust. It has more than 20 citizen journalists – or “CJs” – across the country, some in far flung places such as Kuruman in the Northern Cape and Lusikisiki in the Eastern Cape.
Not only are the CJs paid to write stories about health issues – and municipal delivery that has health consequences – in marginalised communities for Health-e, they monitor medicine stocks in clinics on a monthly basis. This information is sent to the Department of Heath so that it can provide more consistent stocks.
The funding also provides for formal training and technology such as tablets for the CJs.
For Cullinan, the CJ programme is one of the most rewarding aspects of Health-e News, which has a team of about 10 full-time staff members.
“It’s about encouraging ordinary people to be a part of improving the health of the country, and seeing the personal development of the CJs has been amazing,” she told Grubstreet.
A key aim of civic journalism is to encourage journalists to be active participants in communities rather than detached spectators.
Cullinan says that while the CJs’ key thrust is to help ordinary people by holding the authorities to account, the watchdog role is sometimes gratefully received. “I think in the bigger urban areas, the authorities are often jaded and suspicious of the media but we find that in the small towns and villages, government officials are often more responsive to problems, happy to get the information from the CJs and try make things better.”
Health-e is funded by a combination of donor funding and money from the news outlets it services. It publishes its copy on its website and also has a TV unit.
For both GroundUp and Health-e News, seeking and retaining donor funding is the biggest challenge, necessitating that Cullinan and Geffen spend a large amount of their time writing funding proposals.
“Donor funding is unsecure. You’re the flavour of the month today and ignored tomorrow,” Geffen says. “It does worry me for the long-term sustainability of GroundUp and I would like to find ways to make it sustainable in other ways. But it’s not easy. To run any media house that just breaks even is a challenge everywhere on the planet. It’s really hard and it’s not obvious. Advertising is hard to come by.”
Often donor funding has specific deliverables attached to it but Health-e and GroundUp try balance these with their broader aims.
“My board is very clear that we must stick with what we stand for, which is to improve public health coverage in the media and help South Africans to make better health choices,” says Cullinan.
“I don’t think readers realise how expensive and time-consuming it is to produce a competent news story,” says Geffen. “This is also why South Africa is awash with commentary – because it’s cheaper to produce than going out and reporting a story. But without journalism, we don’t have a proper society.”
South Africa’s leading media commentator, Gill Moodie (@grubstreetSA) offers intelligence on media, old and new. Reprinted from her site Grubstreet. This piece was published first on Journalism.co.za, the website of Wits University’s journalism school.
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