by Gill Moodie (@grubstreetSA) From the fall of the Cecil John Rhodes statue at the University of Cape Town to the Student Representative Council (SRC) president’s “I love Hitler” pronouncements at Wits University, South Africa’s campuses have been a big national story this year.
In some instances it was student media rather than the mainstream press that got the story first – a measure of how the genre has grown in the past decade in the number of titles, platforms and quality of content.
It was, for example, the Wits Vuvuzela student paper that broke the story about SRC president Mcebo Dlamini’s “I love Hitler” Facebook post that became a national story, drew in Vice Chancellor Adam Habib and led to revelations that he had falsely claimed to be part of the politically connected Sisulu family.
“There are a lot of student newspapers in South Africa and most started in the 1940s and ‘50s but in the last 10 years or so it’s grown spectacularly,” Carel Willemse, editor-in-chief of Perdeby at the University of Pretoria told Grubstreet last week. “We even have an annual media conference where the different publications get together and discuss trends in media and the way we are doing things.”
The students who volunteer at Perdeby are not journalism students because the university no longer has a journalism programme. “Even when the graduate (journalism) course was running, they only made up a fraction of the students working at the publication,” says Willemse. “We have students from engineering to economics and law working here. It’s a very popular newspaper on campus and that’s what’s kept it alive…We try to keep it student focused.”
Interestingly for a university with an Afrikaans history, Perdeby was a bilingual publication until it started phasing out Afrikaans about three years ago because of feedback from students who said they didn’t understand the language.
Today it is a weekly English-language title (with 10 000 circulation) and a growing website that does exclusive online content and nets about 10 000 unique visitors a month – a figure that jumps to 20 000-30 000 when there is a big breaking story.
“We thought there would be some unhappiness about (becoming an English-language product) but there was only the odd complaint,” Willemse says. “Everyone at Tuks understands English.
“From Perdeby’s side, that’s out role in transformation. It’s a difficult issue at all universities but we’re saying we want to be a publication that’s more inclusive – and I think Afrikaans students accepted that.”
Perdeby is separate from the SRC so it can maintain its independence but it gets a subsidy from the university and is otherwise dependent on advertising. Unusually, for a student publication in SA, Willemse is paid fulltime editor-in-chief but he acts more as a GM running the budget (between R700 000 and R800 000 turnover a year) while the students run the content side.
Willemse gives editorial guidance and oversees ad sales, which is not so hard a sell, he says, because the readership is such a focused demographic.
Willemse, who worked as a student on the paper before he became editor-in-chief in 2008 (he is doing his master’s degree at the moment), says it is interesting to see how the paper has changed in the past 10 years.
“Students have the same issues – there’ll always be problems and controversies within the SRC, for instance – but the change I see is that students are much more vocal.
“Also, the content has changed so that features that we publish now are a much more in-depth look at current affairs… We also try to cover news on other campuses and ex-Tukkies such as Oscar Pistorius – not just things that happen on campus.”
Kenichi Serino, print mentor and co-ordinator of the Wits Vuvuzela print edition, says its main focus is to be a training ground for the university’s journalism honours students.
“We use the paper and the website as a training tool to make the journalists newsroom ready, he says, “so you can’t just thumb-suck ideas and write prose that only pleases yourself and a couple of friends.
“We expect (the reporters) to be alert to breaking stories and to chase stories and get proper sourcing – sometimes that means having awful conversations but that’s something you need to learn to do as a journalist.”
Serino views student publications as a form of community media.
“I think that’s the key thing in how they should work and how they should serve their audience. The audience would like to see themselves in the paper – and things that interest them – so a lot of stories have to be fine-tuned for your audience.”
Ad sales bring in some income for Wits Vuvuzela while Media24 prints it (10 000 copies a week) and contributes to some of the costs.
Serino’s is part-time post and he is also a freelance journalist.
Dinesh Balliah, Vuvuzela’s online co-ordinator, says average daily unique users on the website are about 3 500 and big stories such as that of the SRC president see this leap to about 15 000-20 000 page impressions a day.
Like Perdeby, the websites of Vuvuzela and Rhodes University’s The Oppidan Press do unique content and mobile is a large driver of traffic. Unlike its counterparts at Tuks and Wits, The Oppidan Press has no funded posts.
It is run by journalism students on a volunteer basis, editor-in-chief Stuart Lewis told Grubstreet, and it gets an SRC grant. Other funding comes from advertising and sign-up fees from about 170 members. (The paper is constituted as a student society.)
For a small university such as Rhodes in Grahamstown, it is remarkable there are three student newspapers (besides The Oppidan Press there is Activate and The Progressive) plus a student radio station.
The Oppidan Press has its own dedicated video production arm (called OppiTV) and is aiming to branch out into weekly podcasts soon (OppiFM).
OppiTV has proved a popular platform for students to contribute to, says Lewis, who is a final-year journalism student. “It was started in 2013 with four students and the following year it had about 40.
“We’re looking at being less of a newspaper and becoming more of a media organisation,” he says. “Our general rule of coverage is: ‘Is it relevant to our students and can we cover it better than national and provincial media?’ So, for example, we don’t write stories about Nkandla but we can cover SRC elections better than anyone else.”
The Oppidan Press prints 2 000 papers every fortnight and the website is attracting about 12 000 unique user a month.
A lot of efforts goes into thinking about what the audience wants, says Lewis, and web tools such as Google Analytics and social media help enormously in measuring audience interest.
As with Wits Vuvuzela, The Oppidan Press’s first priority is to be a training ground for student journalists, he says, and a news organisation second.
Says Serino: “The (student journalists) learn by doing. I don’t think you could organise a lecture that would be sophisticated enough to cover what you learn from doing journalism for eight months.”
South Africa’s leading media commentator, Gill Moodie (@grubstreetSA) offers intelligence on media, old and new. Reprinted from her site Grubstreet with Biznews. This piece was published first on Journalism.co.za, the website of Wits University’s journalism school.
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