A week of wins for SAMIP participants

This week saw a range of awards, honours and achievements for participants of the South Africa Media Innovation Program, as well as a new hard-hitting investigation into police abuses, and an explainer on complex debates about South African cultural identities.

Awards for Food for Mzansi, M&G and Daily Maverick

Several SAMIP members were named as winners at the WAN-IFRA African Digital Media Awards 2020 that took place on Tuesday afternoon:  

• Mail and Guardian won Best News Website or Mobile Service for their WhatsApp distributed publication The Continent; 
• Daily Maverick won in two categories – Best Paid Content Strategy, and Best Digital Marketing Campaign for a News Brand, both for its Maverick Insider membership programme; 
• Best of all, agri-news start-up Food for Mzansi won across three categories: Best in Audience Engagement (for the Farmers Inside Track campaign), Best Project for News Literacy (for their citizen journalism project that received funding from the Google News Initiative) and Best Special Project for Covid-19 (for their podcast and audience engagement campaign ‘Thandi and Captain Stay Safe’).

Celebrating digital media in Africa

SAMIP participants were also well represented at the WAN IFRA Digital Media Africa virtual conference this week. Among this year’s speakers were Kathy Magrobi of QuoteThisWoman+; Verashni Pillay of Explain.co.za; Shandukani Mulaudzi from Children’s Radio Foundation, Paul McNally from Volume, Styli Charalambous at Daily Maverick and Ivor Price, Food For Mzansi – each representing their organisation’s work, projects, and experiences, and the emerging opportunities and innovations for digital media projects across the continent. 

M&G names its 200 Young South Africans for 2020

This year the Mail & Guardian hosted the first-ever virtual reveal of its signature “200 Young South Africans” list. The awardees are featured in a M&G special edition which profiles talented young leaders across a range of fields, from science to the arts. Among the awardees this year was our very own Yusuf Omar, co-founder of Hashtag Our Stories, who was named in the Film and Media category. https://200youngsouthafricans.co.za/

Amplifying women’s voices in media

Quote This Woman+ continued its work of building a database of women+ experts as a newsroom resource: this week QW+ eight new woman+ experts on their database, offering expertise on anything from shifts in online learning, to privacy and data protection in Covid-19 contact–tracing apps.

Tackling police brutality against children

Investigative outfit Viewfinder published another data-driven expose on the systemic failure of watchdogs to act on police killings of children in South Africa. This follows national outrage after police allegedly killed 16-year-old Nathaniel Julies, who had Down syndrome. Viewfinder reports that this follows dozens of similar cases in recent years, almost none of which led to convictions. 

 Heritage month debate

September is Heritage Month in South Africa, and youth outlet The Daily Vox tackled a heated debate on social media over perceptions on coloured identity in a post-apartheid South Africa. 

Hashtag partners with Facebook to train African journalists

One of SAMIP’s earliest entrants, Hashtag Our Stories, has partnered with the Facebook Journalism Project to run a six-week training course aimed at journalists on the African continent. The Facebook Video Storytellers-Africa will prepare participants to discover story ideas as well as shoot, script, edit, upload and distribute high-quality videos using a mobile phone. Applications close on 18 September and if you are interested in participating just following this link.

The latest from the agri-business industry

This week in the agri podcast Farmer’s Inside Track, Food for Mzansi catches up with a young cattle farmer in the North West, an agri-business banking expert, and a chef with a secret recipe to the perfect home-cooked meal.