Wag's Rag

2006-09-14T03:52:00.000-07:00

I've set up a photoblog called identify at http://identify.wordpress.com

Have a look, I'll be maintaining that far more than this! :)

2006-08-07T07:25:00.000-07:00

At the Sunday Times Online for a week doing multimedia journalism. Check out NML RAW!

2006-06-14T23:48:00.000-07:00

Create your own Pollock

Opinions are divided on whether Jackson Pollock's work is actually art or not. It depends a lot on your conception of art - must it have at least one ideal meaning? Or is art any creation at all that appeals to our senses in some way or another? Whatever your opinion, this site is an interesting way of spending two minutes trying to create a Pollock-like work of 'art'! Apologies for low image quality, for some reasons printscreening and pasting into Photoshop didn't work, so I had to take a photo of the screen with my cellphone :)

2006-05-17T04:20:00.000-07:00

Breaking through

So around 5000 security guards from the SA Allied and Transport Workers’ Union (Satawu) decided to strike yesterday in Cape Town. Fine - it's their right. But evidently they were more than slightly peeved with the powers that be, and went around smashing shop and car windows, looting, harassing and even violently attacking. It seems the childhood mentality of throwing a temper tantrum when you don't get your way was the order of the day. The police, forced to use stun grenades and rubber bullets, arrested 40 people, including the Western Cape secretary of the Congress of SA Trade Unions (Cosatu), and Evan Abrahams, Western Cape secretary of Satawu. Great - that's not embarrasing - not one bit!

But there was one positive that came from all of this - Media24 Digital produced and published a video of the events... now while videos may be old-hat for international news sites, they are still very rare in the South African online news scene. At Grocott's Mail Online we use them in our special reports, but none of the bigger news websites uses videos at all. So, although Media24's video had no storytelling characteristics like narration, it is encouraging to see that at least some form of video was published. A step in the right direction? For sure - and it's long overdue!

2006-05-15T02:58:00.000-07:00

So, Grahamstown, eh?

Was driving with a friend today and she did a u-turn in front of an oncoming car, causing it to brake quite heavily. I mumbled something in disapproval and she replied that "ag, it's Grahamstown, it doesn't matter."

Okay then.

Sure, this town is full of happy-go-lucky students and rests in a little valley somewhere in the middle of a wacky province in a wacky country (Zuma is once again deputy president of the ANC), but that doesn't mean we're excused from the basic norms and conventions of common sense.

In 'the real world', people who get drunk more than twice a week are seen as alcoholics. In Grahamstown, people who get drunk more than twice a week are seen as life- and fun-loving students just having a good time. Which I suppose is partially true, but my point is that being a student in Grahamstown seems to have become a valid excuse for almost anything one gets up to - and it shouldn't be.

2006-03-04T02:12:00.000-08:00

Sanity expelled

Read this article

Some kids in the USA have been expelled for merely VIEWING a website -- from their own personal computers AT HOME!

This irks me. Who does the school think they are? The function of a school is to educate. What its learners do after hours should be of no concern to the school - unless, of course, what happens out of school hours brings the school's name into disrepute. And I firmly believe that VIEWING a website is hardly detrimental to a school's name. It could be argued that the guy who originated the hate-speech was indirectly bringing the school's name into disrepute - but for the 20 kids who just read what he wrote? Come on! Get real!

2006-03-01T02:27:00.000-08:00

So today is local government election day across South Africa. We're out in full force covering the goings on. There've been no nasty incidents reported so far - let's hope it stays that way. This pic was taken at the public library in town (Grahamstown) - another citizen fulfiling their political and social obligation by casting their vote.

While many people spoken to are positive about the elections and their significane, many others have resigned themselves from the matter, concluding that no matter who they vote for, it won't make a difference. Sometimes one can't help blaming them, when one looks at issues like corruption, nepotism and a distinct lack of proper service delivery.

2006-02-17T07:04:00.000-08:00

I've been a bad blogger! bad, bad blogger! I've, err, been, uhm, busy?!

So, I'm now back at Rhodes in Grahahmstown after spending two months in Cape Town working for a media organisation. That was cool, but it does feel good to be back here - this is where my purpose (for now!) lies. New Media 4 (the course I'm doing) promises to be an exciting, but frantically busy, year. We're working on a new website for the local newspaper (Grocott's Mail), and if all goes according to plan, it should launch on Feb 28 (www.grocotts.co.za) with a whole bunch of awesome multimedia content. Certainly a first of its kind for community newspaper websites in South Africa, and it will definitely give a wack of American sites a good run for their money.

Every day, literally, I see signs of journalism turning more from a profession into a common practice. Access to the resources required to publish information is becoming much easier, more affordable and more widespread. I think the role of the journalist is changing from the identifying, gathering, production and dissemination of news, to the management of it.

In this chaotic information age, people want information to be relevant to them - in their contexts. It is now, more so than ever, the role of the journalist to attempt to channel the mass of information (and information systems) into appropriate and effective bundles of meaning, as the plurality and the diversity of the media have grown to such an extent that 'news' is becoming more and more a fluid and hard-to-harness concept.

So, no longer is the journalist the driver on the information superhighway - now the journalist is the traffic cop.

2005-12-13T05:38:00.000-08:00

The fat guy in the white Audi

Every day I have to walk a 1km stretch of road to the train station. I leave at around 8am every day, so I can get to work by 9am. Almost every single day, at around 8.10am, a white Audi screams down the road towards me. The same white Audi - driven by an enormously large guy. This is my daily morning entertainment - keeping an eye open for the fat guy in the white Audi, hurtling down the road to wherever he goes every day at 8.10am.

I wonder if he sees me every morning, walking the other way, and wonders where I'm going and why I'm looking like I really wished I could have slept in for another half an hour!

2005-12-03T01:43:00.000-08:00

It's not allwrite

From: http://www.news24.com/News24/World/Iraq/0,,2-10-1460_1844813,00.html

"Washington - The United States military confirmed on Friday that it paid to place stories in Iraqi newspapers, going through third parties to reduce the risk to publishers. "
[...]
"The practice of paying to plant favourable stories in the Iraqi press is considered a blow to US credibility and to the independence of the Iraqi media. "

The cheek of it! American media aren't exactly reputed at the best of times for sticking closely to basic journalistic principles such as objectivity, truth, balance, fairness etc... and now the yanks have been busted for whipping out their cheque books and paying their way into the Iraqi media scene. They've realised they've stuck their oiled fingers too far into the Iraq Pie, and decided that it's now much easier just to throw a few manipulative dollars around... poor form.

The Iraqi media also needs a slap on the wrist here. Freedom of speech is an important thing to have, but it means the media are free to act and represent in a fair, true, accurate and balanced way, NOT free to allow any Tom, Dick or Bush to flash their cheque books and whip up "yay us" stories and get them published wherever they want, whenever they want.

Makes you wonder how much other stuff like this is going on around the world. Are transparency and veractiy merely warm fuzzy things the media aspire to in the interim until some tempting financially-viable alternative comes along?

2005-12-02T04:40:00.000-08:00

Today is my second day at my vac job. I'm working at wheels24 (www.wheels24.co.za) for two months, which is a welcome, rewarding, and pretty damn hardcore alternative to hanging around doing almost nothing back in EL. I'm on the 14th floor of the Naspers building in the heart of the city centre. To my right is the vast expanse of the Cape Town harbour, and to my left is the unashamedly beautiful Table Mountain range.

Ag it's okay, you know -- it'll do.

2005-12-02T04:32:00.000-08:00

Hello World.

Those were the first words my first flimsy Turbo Pascal program produced -- roughly 10 years ago . They were also the first words I said when I came into being -- roughly 22 years ago. And now, they're the first words ever typed on my blog. So, Hello World -- welcome to my blog.