Civic and many other formations often rightfully visit both the mainstream and community press to have their activities in print.
More often than not, many of these groupings have no clue what values and market dynamics drive a newspaper, or even electronic media, for that matter.
During my employ at a Pretoria-based daily newspaper, I happened to be weekend off, when in the early hours of a Sunday I heard multiple footsteps on the premises of my house in the township
of Soshanguve.
The mumblings and shuffling footsteps were followed by a rather loud knock at the front door.
When I opened the door I found myself standing eyeball-to-eyeball with Collen Chauke, he of the very first cash-in-transit robbery in Bronkhorstspruit all those many years ago.
Let me hastily settle your nerves by saying Collen and scores of his comrades visited my home before he was linked to the Hollywood-style highway robberies.
At the time he visited my place, Collen was a leading light in the Winterveldt Civic Association, and also the ANC.
As we stood there face-to-face, Collen dared me that the lot of them had visited because I — the newspaper reporter — chose to ignore “problems” within the community.
They had come to challenge me that I visit Winterveldt and see for myself, to which I politely refused, explaining that I was not the duty reporter for the weekend, and was resting.
That brings me to a trend I have noticed around the Waterberg, whereby because of genuine frustrations with officialdom, communities constitute themselves into “concerned” groups.
More often than not these community-based formations have reason to believe in order to be seen working, they need to touch base with the newspaper to have their organisations profiled, and
frustrations published.
One of these groups even dared our reporters that it was in The BEAT’s interest to “chase” them for “juicy” news.
It never fails to amaze me how ordinary citizens have reason to believe they can teach seasoned reporters like Lizzy Bapela, TK Mashaba and Mzamane Ringane — let alone an ol’ man river like me — how to compile a good newspaper.
Let me repeat what I have said, to many such groupings, that it is not the duty of reporters to profile any formation without the back-up of tangible community work.
A good example was the article we published about the Black Lives Matter Foundation (BLMF), which facilitated the distribution of 102 pairs of shoes to needy kids.
The story was about a community-based organisation in action, and not a profile for the sake of free publicity.
The other story was based on foreign business people ploughing back into the community, in terms of food parcels and so forth.
As an afterthought, what about one or even a couple of the community-based groupings taking the initiative to assist the youth, in accessing the upwards of 9 000 job opportunities from the exciting Youth Employment Service (YES) in Limpopo?
— The BEAT
