view.gif

Happy Friday all!

posted by Cat Murray @ 10:30 1 comments

Who Funds Who

I went to a seminar on Wednesday morning organised by Idasa and the Institute for Security Studes (ISS) on the private and corporate funding of political parties. They were addressing the general problems of corruption within the process of giving and receiving donations, and the influence of coporate pressure on the poliy decisions of leading parties.

They have put together a resource website called Who Funds Who which operates as a research database for media workers, researchers and anyone else looking for information about where the funding from political parties comes from and where it goes to. It is a useful resource for journalists and has one an SA Web Award for design and content apparently. I am not too sure about the design aspect, but the content is fairly innovative. They don't have a very wide range of sources for their information though, and rely mainly on the information produced by leading media organisations, the parties themselves and other research organisations.

posted by Cat Murray @ 07:52 0 comments

I think in the shower. Or at night while I am supposed to be sleeping, but aside from that this morning my mind took me back to a comment that Mark Comerford made at the Highway Africa conference in Grahamstown a week or two ago. The plenary was centred on a discussion surrounding what is and is not journalism in relation to new forms of media - blogging in particular. He said that essentially a blog is merely a content management system. Now this got me thinking as I was washing my hair, because he is right. A content management system serves the purpose of organising and facilitating the collaborative creation of documents and other content, and has been very successful in terms of building and running "Digital Newsroom" type multimedia websites that I have been involved with in the past year (see State of the Arts, Commons Sense).

But how does being a CMS make blogs any different from any other news site or website for that matter? I realised this morning that actually every website that collates information and presents it in a logical/readable/easy to access form is actually a CMS. One doesn't really think of a online news publication as a content management system, but it is. Just the same as a blog, just the same as a forum too. It may seem like stating the obvious, but I guarantee it that people don't think this way. They are stuck in the "old media" mindframe that isn't so concerned with the most efficient storage, maintanance and editorial workflow process available.

Then I got to thinking further that if you really want to be valuable as a media worker, this is the area to get into - developing and maintaining really good CMS's that make everybody's life easier. Working with other journalists who don't interact regularly with online publications in terms of producing content and loading it onto the system is a challenge. They don't understand how CMS's work or how they can make your life better. There seems to be a big gap in the market... I want to fill a spot.

posted by Cat Murray @ 07:06 0 comments

This is the beginning...

Watch this space for information about where I am, what I am doing and what I am thinking about bits and pieces here and there. This space will likely serve as a platform for my travel updates and experiences once I leave Rhodes, but also as a place for me to voice what I think about the work I do etc, so you will find a mix of travel stuff and NM stuff here and there to read if you are interested.

I will hopefully also be changing the look and feel of the page when I have some time, but for now we'll have to deal with the stock standard template they have

posted by Cat Murray @ 19:47 0 comments