It never fails to amaze me how long the month of January can drag on.
But for us here at The BEAT, the dreaded month was full of excitement, as we broke one good story after the other.
Readers continue to make a footpath to our offices to pick up copies of the newspaper.
What I personally notice is that readers in this neck of the news get excited more by personality-driven stories than, say, issue-driven narrative such as the political and otherwise.
In a nutshell, our readers shall snap up newspapers like hot cakes if a story breaks out about a particular public figure caught up with his or her hand in the till, and so forth.
And once again we have been up to our necks last week with paperwork, packaging our collective and individual entries for the 2018 Caxton Excellence Awards.
Strange enough, whenever one has to identify one’s best work for the year — 2018 in this instance — one feels there is just nothing extraordinary in one’s efforts covering the whole year.
That is, until one receives an invitation to the awards gala dinner, which effectively means one is on the shortlist of one or other category.
Let me give you a glimpse of the kind of entries we at The BEAT dispatched to the judging panel.
I for one once again entered the best regular column category, which I was deeply humbled to emerge the winner in the 2017 leg of the Caxton Excellence Awards.
I refer here to a column titled “The Other Side of Town”, which I write regularly for our sister publication, Die Pos/The Post.
The same portfolio of columns was also shortlisted for the Forum of Community Journalists (FCJ) Awards.
As a collective at The BEAT we also entered the category of best headline writing, an attempt which was likewise shortlisted for both the Caxton Excellence Awards and the FCJ contest.
We have decided in our wisdom — or lack thereof! — to nudge the reporters to package entries for the impact story category, too.
Two of these packages stand out for me: one based on a chain of events leading to the arrest and charging of four Bela-Bela policemen accused of armed robbery, and how the unfolding story
affected one of our reporters personally and emotionally.
We also had great fun packaging another series of events informed by the untimely passing of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, and a rare picture of her marching alongside comrades in Bela-Bela
during the turbulent 1980s.
With this in mind, I wish to be saying to you around the month of March that one or more colleagues from both The BEAT and Die Pos/The Post, had made the cut into these prestigious awards.
— The BEAT
