CMP: the good, the bad and the impossible

Prinesha Naidoo

Another academic year has come and gone so too have countless courses, of which the Journalism Democracy, Development and Critical Media Production (JDD-CMP) course was the most memorable.

In my opinion everything about the JDD-CMP course, from being met with dissent by community members who accused Rhodes Journalism Students of exploiting them and their personal stories, to dealing with a messy story about human remains, involving several key actors who were either unreachable or refused to comment or just didn’t care about the plight of those for whom they were responsible, was agonising.   

I expected more from the course, I would have liked to have made more of a difference in wards 7 and 8, two of Makana Municipality’s most impoverished zones. Yes, we held a successful soccer tournament in response to residents’ complaints about the lack of adequate recreational facilities and activities, causing their children to stray.  This initiative has however proved unsustainable, almost a month has passed since the tournament and despite their promises, the community members who were actively involved in recruiting and coaching players in run-up to our tournament as well as refereeing matches at the tournament have yet to hold another tournament. Furthermore, the fact community members approached us with serious problems such as poor housing and sanitation, unemployment, cable theft and an overwhelming concern about the ever-increasing crime rate was disheartening – regardless of how hard we tried, we could not help them solve such problems.

As a television student, I also felt let down by the course. I looked forward to working in multimedia groups, learning from my peers and being exposed to the intricacies and necessary software for their respective specialisations. This however, was not the case as the course required television students to work independently of other specialisations.

Despite or rather because of the aforementioned problems, I feel that I learnt a lot and grew both as a media producer and individual during the course of the CMP component of the course. As scary as it was, going blind into a strange place helped me develop the necessary skills to engage with a host of different types of people as well as to maintain contact with sources. I also learnt of the paramount importance of fact-checking, just by immersing ourselves in the community and talking to locals we found that a visually appealing story that planned on covering was based on hearsay – the information given to us by a local was unfounded. Having to deal with a messy story about human remains, as stated above, whose angle every so often as a result of the amount of people and institutions involved in the matter and the fact that the area in which the human remains were found is a potential historical site, taught me that sometimes having one back-up plan just isn’t enough – as excruciating as it was, going back to the drawing board each time taught me how to see and thus present the same old story in a different light.   

In terms of distributing our final product, as a television unit we felt that handing out DVDs community members who barely afford to make ends meet, let alone television sets and DVD players was rather silly. Therefore, we decided to only to hand DVDs to the relevant authoritative figures used in our stories. In terms of giving our finished products back to the community, we decided to convert the avi files to mp4 files, which are compatible on cell phones and to send them to the community members, whose cell phone numbers we collected at the public meeting, via Bluetooth. This means that our work has the potential to be viewed by the masses and to go viral as they can be sent free of charge, from cell phone to cell phone via Bluetooth.

While the stories covered offer no outright solutions to the problems vexing wards 7 and 8, I strongly believe that using Bluetooth to publicise our finished products, will go a long way in the repairing the reputation and damage done by past Rhodes Journalism students in the greater Grahamstown area.