#bct100: A note from the editor – so, here I am

I could not have imagined that upon quitting my first job just nine months into it in 1989 for a post of a junior reporter at Germiston City News would see me penning a congratulatory message to the Benoni City Times as its editor 32 years later.

The newspaper was already 50 years old when I was born.

They say journalism is in your blood and you have a nose for news or you don’t.

Any of the former editors who have reminisced with us will testify to the fact that we try to develop that nose in young reporters who show other attributes good for the job.

It’s always a bonus though to get one with that instinctive grasp of news, especially community news – like the nose William Hills, our founder, clearly had.

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One of my first assignments under Hilary Green at the Germiston City News (which William Hills also founded) was a dental exhibition at the local library.

With camera and notebook in hand, I attended this assignment and promptly wrote my story, ever so proud. My first assignment had gone well.

Then disaster struck as the sub-editor at the time (I’ll just call her Anna), a woman far fiercer than her bony frame and far more wrathful than her perfectly done-up face, screeched with laughter at the fact I’d headed the story a dental “expedition”.

I was the laughing stock of the newsroom and would at that moment have rather been under the drill at the dentist or on an expedition up Everest never to return!

The stories and memories of my journey with Caxton are plentiful, and many are thanks to the lashings and humiliations editors of the day dished out to us young journalists.

I was a very green reporter when most of these editors were in the hot seat already. My firmest mentor was undoubtedly Hilary Green.

It is an honour, especially now that I have engrossed myself so fully in the past months about the history of the newspaper’s founder, to be in the hot seat at Benoni City Times.

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Times have changed but William Hills teaches us good community stories never die and that a local newspaper is its people.

I’d like to think the local press has helped hone that nose for news in ordinary folk living in the towns the newspapers serve and that they will forever be our cheerleaders to ensure, as Sidney Gill said, our newspaper sticks around as something Benoni can be truly proud of.

Those who have come after Hills have forged an unmistakable path to success. I hope my footsteps will do the same.