Time to Call it a day

By Yvonne Nhuta

The JDD-CMP course has been a major learning experience for me as an individual and I think I can safely say a good majority of the JMS3 class. Although it was met with a bit of scepticism at the beginning of the semester, the process of learning to practise public journalism has most likely changed the minds of a lot of students, myself included.

When I first heard about what we would be doing as part of the course, I felt that our venture into the field of public/development  journalism came at the price of extorting the greater Grahamstown community. I felt that although the intention may have been honourable, our audiences and sources would feel that we were merely using them to get a grade and ultimately a degree. I thought in essence we would not really be making that much of a positive impact on these communities but in fact would be giving them a visibly negative and fraudulent perception of Rhodes journalism students.  The main reason for this train of thought was the fact that essentially the work we were going to be doing was going to be done because we were told to do so. As student s we did not sit down and come up with a public journalism project by ourselves and consequently we would be, in a manner of speaking, using these communities for our own benefit – to pass this course.

Although this perception of the course made it difficult to see how much we could actually do for these communities, I found that as the course went along, the work we produced was no longer merely for marks but intended in our small way as a method of exacting change in the Grahamstown communities. It became less about only getting it done, but also about getting it done right. After speaking to community members during the civic mapping process, it was evident that some of them felt that previous JMS classes had let them down by finishing their course and never going back to follow up and not leaving any lasting impact. As a result of this the drive to do something for the community through our journalism became stronger. One of the main concerns in our areas was the lack of resources for the youth, and stemming from this focus we helped in organising a soccer tournament for the children of wards 7 and 8. After this tournament I felt that in our small way we had given the community a platform from which they could begin to exact change in their own areas.

The actual media production process was quite demanding with regards to both time and energy. It required a lot more than most of us were used to also considering that we were working in groups and not individually. I feel I was quite fortunate as my group and sub group members worked quite well together and problems with group dynamics were somewhat averted.  I did feel that we were under more pressure working as a group because all our ideas had to be meshed together to form one cohesive and clearly comprehensible idea. It was a growing experience as a designer, learning to value the creative ideas of others and also appreciating the significance of all the other specialisations particularly writing and editing and photojournalism in the WE(P)D case.  We may not have been able to get people new houses or gotten the municipality to provide more water for the community but we did get the community members voices heard and their problems highlighted. Which I suppose is a fundamental learning point in this course; that as journalists we can only do so much but what we produce has limitless possibilities.