A place for you
Grocott’s Mail is committed to our role as a community media organisation and we’ve considered and consulted about ways to bring more value to the community we serve, including you our readers, in 2017.
• We recognise that there are people and organisations in Grahamstown offering excellence in their specialist areas.
• We are more committed than ever to supporting and featuring quality in-depth journalism with civic issues and local government; courts and crime and education at the core.
• We plan to strengthen our content in those areas, while maintaining a steady matrix of community dialogue and reporting online and in print.
• And we remain committed to our role of providing platforms for young journalists to learn and hone their profession.
If you were in any doubt that Grocott’s Mail belongs to you, the community, please know that in addition to the work of our own reporters and the letters we receive from readers, we feature in regular monthly or biweekly columns and articles the expertise, ideas and opinions of close on 30 Grahamstown people.
In 2017 we plan to grow our Makana Voices section, providing a place for diverse and divergent views to be shared and debated, as well as ordinary people just saying how they see things. If you have something to say, we’d love to hear from you. Our readers already enjoy regular expert analysis and straight-up information by guest writers and columnists in science, environment, health and other specialist areas.
We’ve identified five areas ar entities significant in Grahamstown and key to turning around the town’s fortunes, and believe that providing a regular platform for leaders in those areas to share their vision and programmes would be valuable to the town.
These areas are education; arts and culture and the Creative City; economic development; local government and Rhodes University.
We’ve identified some key movers in those areas and you’ll be hearing much more from them, more often, soon.
We’ve asked them to imagine, within the scope of their expertise, What could Grahamstown look like? And to share their vision with our readers.
This week the ministry of higher education has cemented alliances with the departments of social development and military veterans through special National Student Financial Aid Scheme funding for prospective tertiary institution students in those categories.
Ensuring educational support for disadvantaged groups, or providing desperately needed channels to gainful employment, casts a wider light on funding for tertiary education.
Whether these and other factors will change the discourse of the free fees lobby will soon be seen.
Grocott’s Mail wishes Grahamstown’s schools – the government schools that opened this week, as well as the independent schools which have a little longer to relax – a successful and thoughtful 2017.