Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
Students’ own Argus opens frontiers
Paper lets #FeesMustFall protesters write their own stories
THE student protests took many – including those in the media – by surprise, but a Cape Town newspaper saw an opportunity to give the students a voice… and gave them control over some of its pages.
The Cape Argus reacted to a tweeted challenge from social media trainer and guru Gus Silber that it give over editorial space to allow students to tell their own story.
The paper’s editor, Gasant Abarder, loved the idea and accepted the challenge, calling on students, through social media, to contact the Cape Argus. The message went viral and people were enthusiastic, but because the students in Cape Town were not organised under leadership structures, it was difficult for the paper to find a single contact to get the idea into action.
Abarder recalls that a fellow journalist told him he should reach out because “the students don’t need us”.
The editor and one of his colleagues, Lance Witten, went to UCT’s Lower Campus, where a rally was under way.
The Cape Argus men approached a student representative who had addressed the rally. He listened and caucused with a few fellow students. A few minutes later six students (another two joined later) elected by their peers – a law student, drama student and political science student among them – got into Abarder’s car and headed back to the newsroom.
Abarder remembers: “They were suspicious of us – one even suspected I was from national intelligence (that hurt!). But as the day grew on a mutual respect was forged and we ended up learning lots from each other.”
For the Cape Argus editor, the enterprise – handing over effective control of news pages to outsiders – was unprecedented, “and as someone put it on Twitter, I was going where no other editor had gone before”.
The reality was simple: “The next day, we would either be lauded or I might be without a job! As I stood listening to the rally on that grassy patch on UCT’s Lower Cam- pus, I wondered at one point if I knew what the hell I was doing. It was a massive leap of faith – by both sides – but it paid off.”
Abarder says the project required “all involved to leave their egos at the door”.
The student co-editors were clear about what they wanted on their pages, but were prepared to compromise and adapt their copy to fit into Cape Argus format.
As soon as the student co-editors – Ameera Conrad, Dela Gwala, Leila Khan, Brian Kamanzi, Mbali Matandela, Amanda Xulu, Busisiwe Nxumalo and Simon Rakei – arrived, Abarder called a joint editorial meeting.
“It was after noon and I was about to rearrange the entire plan for the next day’s edition. But I had decided that we were going to go big or go home. I announced to my staff and the student co-editors that I was ceding exactly half of my authority as editor to them. I had to be generous and stick to my word.
“I committed to giving the student co-editors the front page, pages 2 to 5, the leader article and main oped piece to tell their story of the #FeesMustFall campaign.”
The rest of the news space (three pages) would be for general and world news and these as well as the usual pages like business, letters, sport and others would be produced by the Argus editorial staff.
“I undertook not to prescribe to the co-editors what to write or what content to source for their pages. They had carte blanche in writing their headlines, captions, and subheads and in picture selection.”
When the next editorial conference took place later in the afternoon, Abarder says, the students were “more than ready and came up with a lucid and intelligent plan to fill all the pages we had given them”.
He adds: “They were fast, efficient and presented cogent and compelling content. The copy was ready by 5pm – beating our own 6pm deadline for copy. If we changed five words – I had asked my news desk to keep their copy as authentic as possible – it would have been five words too many.”
The students had finished all their work, including writing captions, headlines and subheads and selecting pictures and proofreading, by 7pm – two- and- a- half hours before the paper’s “off-stone” (final) deadline. Once their work was done, they rejoined their fellow protesters.
For Abarder, the experiment was a resounding success and, he notes, it dealt squarely with the criticism that the media wasn’t getting to the heart of the story and the feeling that the voices of the protesters was absent from the narrative.
“I also felt that students were being labelled as hooligans by people who didn’t understand the context of their protest.”
Bringing in non-journalists to put such a major part of the paper together was an approach that “fits squarely with the ethos of the Cape Argus”, says Abarder.
“It is a daily newspaper ‘with heart’ that strives to capture the story from the human interest perspective rather than regarding itself as a newspaper of record.”
One of the reasons the innovative project worked was that “we were able to provide authentic firstperson accounts from people directly involved in and affected by the protests”.
There was a similar sort of cooperative venture recently in Europe, when a newspaper handed over its pages to refugees, allowing them to edit an edition telling their stories.
Says Abarder: “It certainly is a novel way to change the narrative and test the parameters of media laws and practice.”
With hindsight, “I think, in all honesty, that we learnt far more from the students than they did from us. They wrote with a certain kind of unfiltered honesty that you won’t easily find in reportage. They gave raw insight into the issues that reported speech just can’t convey. They drove home the point that to be an effective unit as a team, you have to listen, listen and listen.”
For those involved in newspapers, “this kind of moment helps to make the penny drop. It gives life to the ‘ digital first, print best’ mantra. We can’t possibly compete with social media, radio and TV on news events like the student protests or a fire.
“But by telling the story in compelling, innovative ways we can change the game and make print relevant and the premium platform for unique, in-depth and critical content.”
Abarder reckons: “Ninety- five percent of our readers loved the idea and found it innovative and refreshing. The broader student community, and our traditional readers, thought we were bold and brave and that finally a member of the so- called mass, mainstream media was giving them a platform to tell their own story and write their own narrative.”
By late morning, readers were complaining that copies at their local outlets had been sold out, and the circulation department began receiving requests to hold or reserve copies because people wanted to have a copy as a keepsake.
“There were requests from as far afield as Joburg and Durban for hard copies of the paper – even though we had published all the content on IOL. I have never seen such a response to any newspaper edition in my 15- year association with newspapers.”