The month of June is dedicated to the school pupils who lost their lives during the 16 June 1976 uprising in Soweto. This year marked the 41st anniversary of the Soweto Uprising where 15,000 students gathered at Orlando West Secondary School with the intention of participating in a peaceful march to the nearby Orlando Stadium.
Having only been launched last year August the South Africa Media Innovation Program is young at heart. We’re still less than a year old but we’ve done so much in the intervening time between our start and today.
SAMIP hosted a Sales & Business Development Workshop which took place on the 6th & 7th of June. The workshop was attended by some of the SAMIP grantees, two MDIF clients and two organisations from JamLab. The workshop was facilitated by Carl Davis, Matthew Buckland, Riaan Wolmarans, and Chrizelda Viljoen.
SAMIP also participated in this year’s Duke Menell Media Exchange which took place on the 8th and 9th of June. SAMIP launched the #PerfectPitch challenge with the hopes of finding SA’s next lit media company. The winners of #PerfectPitch were GSport4Girls, Politically Aweh and Quintessential ZA. The winning startups will get a chance to be entered into our program through general applications, whilst also receiving some mentoring from Matthew Buckland.
The team has also been meeting with applicants for general entry into the program which is still open for innovative news and information services startups to enter.
Client Highlights
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- Our grantees participated in the Duke Menell Media Exchange, taking part in a number of workshops and panel discussions. Osiame Molefe from Collective Media Cooperative and Soul City Institute for Social Justice CEO Lebo Ramafoko who sat on a panel discussing missing narratives in South Africa.
- Volume News: They made a presentation about their business in local community radio stations in front of the Mayor of Johannesburg, Herman Mashaba, and the City of Johannesburg Metropolitan Municipality.
- Digest: Dhanyal Davidson was invited to present his newsletter during a EdTech’s pitch evening within the Cape Innovation and Technology Initiative. Digest also launched a new website and new branding
- Pocket Reporter has been converted into a web application after existing as an Android application since its initial development. The story generation tool also added more templates including a health story template in collaboration with Health-E News.
- Hashtag Our Stories: They won the best social short form award, and best mojo marketing campaign, at the Mobile Journalism Festival which took place on the 29th – 31st May in Ireland.