There’s only one official reading for this class, and it’s the text of the Hugh Cudlipp lecture, given this year by the editor of The Guardian, Alan Rusbridger. It’s entitled “Does journalism exist.”

Here are three salient bits.

Oh, and guest lecturer is Mail & Guardian Managing Editor Verashni Pillay, follow her on Twitter @verashni and read some of her columns here.

African Media Chiefs to Discuss Sustainable Business Models at Annual Summit

JOHANNESBURG, September 2 – Leading African media executives are preparing to meet in Tanzaniafrom 26-29 September for the 2010 edition of the Africa Media Leadership Conference (AMLC). This year’s summit will focus on identifying and developing “Sustainable Media Business Models in the Digital Age”.

The AMLC series – now in its ninth year – is the foremost pan-African gathering of senior media professionals, and the gathering represents a key opportunity for Africa’s most influential media leaders to discuss strategic, operational and other challenges in a fast and constantly changing media landscape.

A shot of the decapitated statue of Nkrumah in Ghana, where last year's AMLC conference was held.

Since its inception in 2002, the meetings have developed into an annual high-level forum for strategy formulation, networking and sharing by senior executives of print, broadcast, online and converged media on the African continent.

The conference is co-hosted by Rhodes University’s Sol Plaatje Institute for Media Leadership (SPI) and Germany’s Konrad Adenauer Stiftung (KAS), and was convened to promote high-level interaction among Africa’s media chiefs.

“This year we switch focus from a broad look at understanding and doing digital media in Africa to specifics of what works and what does not work under African conditions,” said SPI Director Francis Mdlongwa.

Frank Windeck, the director of Konrad Adenauer Stiftung’s Sub-Sahara Africa Media Programme, the sponsor of the AMLC series, said: “These meetings provide Africa’s top media people with a unique opportunity to network at the highest level, debating  key industry challenges, while seeking practical solutions by examining case studies drawn from Africa.”

The conference meets annually in an African country, and past AMLC summits have debated timely topics such as “Managing Media in a Recession” (Mauritius, 2002); “South Meets East: Strategic Challenges for African Media” (Nairobi, Kenya, 2006); and “Learning  from the Future: Africa’s Media Map in 2029” (Accra, Ghana, 2009).

Issued by:

SPI Director Francis Mdlongwa (email: f.mdlongwa@ru.ac.za; mobile phone +27-(0) 83-629-2312; office phone +27-(0) 46-603-8781; fax  +27-(0) 46-622-9591)

KAS Director Media Programme for Sub-Sahara Africa Frank Windeck (email: Frank.Windeck@kas.de;  office phone +27-(0) 11-214-2900)

One listener’s poetic is another’s ponderous, and I fear I lean towards the latter evaluation of The Black Heart Procession’s sixth album, wittily entitled Six. Nick Cave without the fire and passion, Tom Waits without the whimsy, this is a relentlessly gloomy series of dirges about devils, love, drugs, darkness and fishcakes. Okay, not fishcakes, but it would have added a refreshing twist, some much needed contrast.

The BHP do get their groove on every now and then, but it’s more the groove of a scar on your wrist then any carnivalesque dancing with Mr D. There is a certain beauty to a song like ‘Heaven and Hell’, with its slow, sliding rhythm and emphatic, almost dogged drumming, but lyrics like “I found heaven and hell, I thought you came to save my heart, you came to crush my soul” makes one long for the overblown metaphors of, say, Alice Cooper.

Iri Sulu is a pretty, evocative track too, once you’ve got over the disappointment of realising it’s not a reggae homage to the helmsman from the Starship Enterprise. But with lyrics like “Am I alive or am I dead, am I awake or in a dream”, you can’t help thinking, who cares. Just make up your mind, and take these torpid songs somewhere with a beginning and an end. So some fodder for your iPod playlist, but Six isn’t an album you’ll often want to listen to from beginning to end.

[First published in, and on, the Mail & Guardian]

Unbelievably, a Holiday Inn

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The images in the gallery above are captioned, but it’s worth pointing out a couple of things. You need to stay overnight in Maputo, and the Holiday Inn there is right on the beach, and pretty cheap. You WILL encounter a corrupt official you’ll need to bribe. Let your conscience make of that what you will. And you have to carry all your own water, food, and a spade of course.

I travelled with the M&G’s  two talented, smart multimedia interns, Hannah and Aaron, and @amandasevasti (her blog on Mozambique here), and you definitely need a 4×4 to get to Milibangalala. It’s an unusual feeling for a group, being absolutely alone, camping by a beach for 5 days. But it sure gives you time to stare at your potje.

Thanks to the inimitable Demelza Bush for shooting and editing this for me.

Hello, Students of the Damned.

And by that I mean, welcome to the wonderful world of journalism in flux. Nothing is certain in the online world, except that it’s a great place to be if you like change, uncertainty, and making it up as you go along. Not making up the stories – making up what journalism is, because social media, multiple delivery platforms, UGC, and all the other wonderful benefits/curses of the digital age have made journalism a fascinating industry that continually reinvents itself.

Enough blather – here’s a reading list, although really, you shouldn’t need one. All you need is a search engine, a brain that works, and a high speed connection. Nobody needs to be told what to read anymore. Go find it yourself.

But, in the interests of propping up the lazy sods among you, here are a couple of starting points for a lecture entitled

“‘If a newspaper dies in a forest, and nobody is there to read it….’ The state of the world’s publishing industry.”

The question/s to be answered in class:

What’s the difference between these pieces of content, which of them is journalism, and why?

1. Strikers dance as hospital patients are left high and dry
Lisa Steyn and Tarryn Harbour

2. Strike a rock, don’t objectify it
Valencia Talane

3.Video: The Dancing Striker
Chris Roper

READING LIST

Three Modest Proposals for Online Journalism’s Future
Micah L. Sifry

Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable
Clay Shirky

The Wounded U.S. Newspaper Industry Lost $7.5 Billion in Advertising Revenues Last Year
Erick Schonfeld

The Decline of Newspaper Revenue and the Promise of the Human Network
Bryan Solis

How the Internet is Affecting Traditional Journalism
Jolie O’Dell

Newspapers: 5 Ways to Avoid Extinction
Woody Lewis

12 Things Newspapers Should Do to Survive
Vadim Lavrusik

10 Ways Newspapers are Using Social Media to Save the Industry
Woody Lewis

But seriously –

Go to bing.com or google.com. Type in search phrases, such as (but not limited to) the following:

crowdsourcing
social media journalism
Newspaper Online vs. Print Ad Revenue

There’ll be new stuff on these topics by the time class rolls around.

It’s open every Thursday or Friday, or something like that. Kinda informal. I booked there last Thursday, and it’s a pretty unique experience.

Everyone, friends and strangers alike, share one long table seating about 20, and the chef sets up with some gas bottles and a hob, and whips up some great food. On the night I was there, we had a Spanish rabbit stew, some veal limone, a very tasty goat’s cheese and cabbage salad, and a delicious trout dish, all served on big platters that you pass around. And there were probably a lot more courses, but in an environment where it’s freezing cold, and you bring your own wine, things tend to get a little hazy.

The food is an attraction, but even more enticing is the fact that you’re sitting on a street corner in a relatively deserted city, an oasis of good cheer and quirky service. Mess is a collaboration between a friendly Kathryn White, who joins you at the table to eat (or at least did so on the night I was there), and chef-for-a-night Jonathan Cane. Eating there is an experience I’d heartily recommend, with one caveat – don’t go if you have a fear of lung cancer.

What is it with Joburgers and their cigarettes? I knew it was going to be a trying evening when the chef detailed the menu while holding a cigarette. By the second course, I couldn’t breath, and my tastebuds were severely compromised. If you’re the sort of fuckwit who goes to cool restaurants so that you can pose with a cigarette, can’t you stick to Hooters?

So while I urge you to book at The Mess, for an evening that’ll live in your memory for a long time, I’d also suggest that you try and specify an non-smoking event, so that you actually have a long time to remember it.

(Reservations: Kate 083 778 5303 & welovemess@gmail.com. R200 a head. The Mess.

Watching a performance by Carlo Mombelli and the Prisoners of Strange is to be taken on a fascinating, lyrical and sometimes odd journey through unorthodox timing and enthralling headspace.
Listening to them on Theory is also a journey, but in a different way — here you won’t have the beautiful distractions of the performance itself, but instead you’re left alone with the force of the music. And what music. It’s described on their official site as “spontaneous freestyle chamber jazz”, which gives you a small clue.
The Prisoners are master bass player Mombelli, acclaimed and eclectic trumpeter Marcus Wyatt (get his superlative 2006 release, Language 12), drummer Justin Badenhorst and voice artist Siya Makuzeni. Together they play jazz that’s as experimental as it’s rooted in tradition and as entertaining as it’s intriguing.
A track like joburg-downpipe-gutter-bows, for example, makes use of found instruments such as the eponymous gutter bow (at least I assume it’s not a regular instrument), as well as the unbelievable voice of Makuzeni, to create a sound that’s got a rocking rhythm to move you along, but also an arresting dissonance to interrupt your ease.
Sonic design collective improvisation — fire is probably more the sort of free jazz that you’d associate with the avant-garde, a gloriously rampaging soundscape with some frenziedly tamped-down wind improvisation. But there’s melody as well as fire on Theory, one of those albums that demands to be listened to as a whole, each piece reading off the other to produce music of lovely genius.

(First published in a roundup of local jazz cds on the Mail & Guardian)