Haas’s “public philosophy” which focuses on allowing the public to contend in their own form of deliberation in which the public is the source of information and is actually a part of conveying this information to others, is a challenging form of journalism to contend with as students of formal, structured journalistic practices. As a group our journalistic processes were changed drastically in terms of how we gained our information, as well as how we chose how we wanted to convey our stories to a particular audience. Haas was useful in the sense as his philosophies set the tone for an official departure from the restrictive practice of traditional practices of journalism.
In terms of processes and outputs, our group focused on the ideas of public deliberation through public meetings and focus groups, in which we held a public meeting for Ward 10. From that meeting, we established contacts and went back to the area several times to engage in more in depth conversations with the people we had met. These were people who were willing to talk to us and who also saw how our interactions with them could be beneficial. This meeting consisted of allowing the public to voice their concerns and maybe offer some solutions to these problems. We found that through this meeting we were able to form connections with a select group of Mary Waters’ residents, and through this we were able to establish a connection with our profile subject, JR. In this way allowing the public to voice their concerns in a public space, allows journalists to becomes more involved and personalise their work with a community as the grassroots of a problem are able to be exposed. After this meeting we allowed JR is take us around his community and tell his story, which was a fresh and enlightening aspect of using public journalism, as we did not dictate our outputs, JR merely told us his story which dictated how our short profile would end up.
In Ward 4 public deliberation was very difficult to accomplish due to the sparse environment we encountered. We had to attend a short meeting in which ANC councillors visited a farm in the ward. The farmer Peter Wylie was able to become our subject and he told us about his problems and the plight of farmers in his area. In this way we used a divergent form of public journalism, as instead of gaining a collectivised voice we focused on one voice, who represented a whole sector of society i.e. Farmers in Ward 4. This was something which is a difficulty in promoting public journalism in South Africa as due to our illiteracy rates and trying to gain public deliberation in an area which finds it hard to communicate effectively internally. Without stable structures or a form of public meeting space, Haas’s theory is very difficult to propagate in these kind of areas.
What was gained in this course would be our new found approach to creating personal stories, which ignore the basic precepts of proven journalistic practices and which seem to have a more drastic and powerful affect on a community, than a 30 minute news bulletin could ever have. We have been met with very positive responses about our objectives and the pieces we have produced, which does show that the community feels as if public journalism can benefit them, which is obviously one of its objectives. We also think our work served the interest of marginalized social groups, particularly our farming story. Farmers have become a vulnerable and marginalised group in our country and this project allowed us to give one such farmer the platform to air his views.
What could be seen to have been lost would be the more idealistic functions of Haas’s theory, such as its focus on problem solving, in which the public are given an active role in trying to solve the problems they have encountered through their deliberation. We found that this part of this philosophy is incredibly difficult to mediate in a society in which the public are quite apathetic towards change and helping themselves. In both of our wards, the communities can identify every problem they have, yet they cannot change what is still occurring. We believe that through this course, their stories can be heard and told but the role of public journalism as a tool of problem solving is very difficult in the social circumstances of our country. The whole idea of “public deliberation” was also a difficult one to mediate, as in both of our wards the public did not turn out in large numbers at meetings or focus groups, which made it difficult to gain a “public voice” behind the issues which we heard about and catalogued for story ideas.
It would have been a lot more encouraging for us to know that we were building on something that others had established before us and that others would continue long after our participation in this course. Haas’s case studies did show that a longer time frame is needed in this respect.
We have changed our perceptions about how we should produce journalism, we have made stable relationships with our sources, in which we have become immersed in their own lives and actually gain some kind of emotional purchase out of our work. It is no longer a mechanical process of gaining sources, shooting the story, finding b roll, we are actually invested in the story and we are living other people’s lives through our work.
However we also feel that there is a certain conflict in our identities, as we try to balance our roles as journalists and as problem solvers. We are trying to focus on public and development journalism but it is difficult to keep up this kind of identity is a stressed, time constrained environment. We find it hard to determine exactly what our roles should be in this form of journalism, are we our sources friends and allies, or should we back away from our personalised relationships with our sources.
It becomes difficult to therefore distinguish how to exactly go about relating and engaging with, not only the content of the stories told by the members of society but also with the moral implication it has on us as both people and members of the Grahamstown community. Do we sympathise and solely take their view with subjectivity or do we distance ourselves with the understanding that in order to ‘traditionally’ engage with the material, we need to be as subjective and ‘politically correct’ as possible. That is also one of the biggest challenges of this project and once we decided to be advocates and represent (echo) the community’s voice subjectively, we were able to then play a distinct role in that community.
We set out to create a message to the youth and a message to agricultural authorities. Our two stories “Afbrekers” and “Farms Under Threat” were both intended to be alternative and to focus on the public, rather than the elite.
We hope that the “Afrekers” story will be a challenge to the youth living in the area and it will prompt some sort of positive and sustainable action towards changing some things in the area. As it is, there is already a Community Policing Forum in the area that deals with these drug related problems alongside the police. The community themselves have also started their own very small but effective youth programmes, like the dance competitions , that help keep the youth engaged in things other than drugs. We just wanted to build on what the community themselves were already doing and just partner with them in their efforts. We did not ask to do the piece for them but we will be leaving copies of it with these community NGOs for use in the future when they go into schools etc to talk to the youth.
The farming story will be distributed throughout the farming community with the help of Peter Wylie in order for others to gain some understanding about what needs to be done for farmers in the country.
Dan,Duduetsang & Fayo
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