I was very excited to see this week that South Africa's oldest independent newspaper, Grocott's Mail (a community newpaper in Grahamstown) has gone live online with a bang. The website itself forms a benchmark, I think, for what a news site should be. I say this for a number of reasons:
1. The site incorporates citizen journalism into it's editorial workflow. This allows for public critisicm and debate around the topics at hand, as well as a platform for students to have their work on display and open to criticism. This can only do good for the standards of journalism and practical reporting that come out of Rhodes School of Journalism and Media Studies and the Grocott's newsroom.
2. The site contains multimedia elements which dramatically enhance the reader's interaction and engagement with the stories. One example of this is a special report on the recent local government elections in SA, which combines audio and photo slideshows, text and graphics in a super user-friendly manner which is clean and easy to navigate.
3. The site also has a system of 'tags' or categories of interest, with a graphic visualisation, that filters content in relation to reader's areas of interest, and also in relation to their similarity to other users. This means you can get to the stuff you really want to read quickly and easily, and all the relevant content is neatly grouped together for you to browse in your own time. It's a very useful system that makes sifting through piles of content to find what you want very much easier.
4. Aside from the functionality of the site and reader experience, I am also very excited about the underlying newsroom management system that has enabled this site to work. User-friendly and streamlined content management and editorial workflow is the key to a successful news site, and if my experience with the New Media Lab developments in content management are anything to go by, this system is something we need to pay attention to and something I would be excited to use in the future.
I am also interested to see what impact this site has on the local print media readership in Grahamstown, and how accessible the website is going to be to the wider Grahamstown communities with limited technological access.
I would hope that this is the direction that national news sites will head into soon, and well done guys on producing an excellent website. Keep pushing the boundaries.
posted by Cat Murray @ 18:42
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