10, 9, 8 …

Fewer than 10 days left in the States – crazy! Today, I tried looking around for a travel adapter in Evanston because Amazon charges double the unit price for shipping this piece of plastic. Luckily, Uncle Dan’s will have a three-pronged, grounded adapter in store on Monday. Whew!

Anyway, I just wanted to write a few words about where I’ll be interning next quarter. In order to graduate from Medill, I need to complete a three-credit sequence that involves a internship at a “Medill-approved” media site. While most of the sites in this Journalism Residency program are in domestic newsrooms, there are a few in South Africa. I’ll be interning at The Times in Johannesburg, South Africa for 10 weeks. 

The Times - 11/6/08

The Times is a relatively new newspaper in South Africa. Launched in 2007, The Times was billed as the country’s first multimedia newsroom. With a myriad of content in video, audio, photo and online platforms, the move toward advancing The Times’ Web site was quite gutsy in a country where Internet penetration isn’t as high as in the United States. (South Africa: 10.5 percent versus U.S.: 72.5 percent)

The paper also distributes mobile news to cell phones. Times Mobile is a Web site that, from its start in late 2008, had a wider audience in mind. In South Africa, people have better access to SMS/cell phones than Internet/computers, so this is a pretty ingenious idea. In addition, The Times is beginning to dabble in social media. It has a Twitter account and recently launched an election Web site where visitors can “vote” for the political party they support, learn a bit about the different options they have and the issues being discussed in the campaigns. 

As I get acclimated to the newsroom, I’ll probably post something more descriptive about The Times including a better idea of the paper’s circulation, Web traffic, competition and target audience/demographics. Until then, I’ll say a few initial things I’ve heard about the press in South Africa. 

According to the 2008 Press Freedom Index compiled by Reporters Without Borders, South Africa is ranked 36th in the world, tied with the United States. The international organization publishes the annual index every October, measuring “the amount of freedom journalists and media have in each country and the effort governments make to comply with press freedom and promote it.” The fact that the U.S. and South Africa are tied was surprising to me at first, but now that I’ve had a chance to mull it over, I guess it was my ethnocentric sense of American exceptionalism that had me wrongly thinking we enjoyed greater press freedoms than South Africans. Maybe I was confusing our uniquely liberal speech freedoms with our access-prohibitive press freedoms. Suffice it to say, it was a humbling realization. 

From the Sowetan advocating for Black Africans during Apartheid to the Bang Bang Club photographing some of the most iconic images of the 20th century, South Africa undoubtedly has a history of great journalism. While some who have gone before me have told me they’ve been frustrated with culture shock, sensationalism and the shorter articles they were writing in South Africa, I think it’ll be exciting to practice journalism in another country and to learn how a foreign newsroom operates. I’m sure there will be some interesting journalistic comparisons to be made aside from writing in British English (colour! cheque! programme!) and not following AP style. I’ll try my best to illuminate on some of these differences and similarities as they come up while I’m abroad. 

O.K., time to start packing. 

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