News Package 2- Street name changes in Durban

I had already got used to how New Media works and thought it would be a piece of cake. This time around, having done television in the first semester, we had to show our video skills in this assignment. This time we had to produce a video package and the other different thing this time around was that we had to work in pairs. I chose to work with my friend Nomfundo Mlaba and we were such a great team even though it is never a walk in the park doing school work with a friend.

We did the crowd sourcing and we used Facebook as the social media platform.  Even though I had said I would consider Twitter for my second package, but due to the limitation of characters, Facebook was the only sensible option. As much as it was a better option, this time around, there was not that much number of responses from the people on Facebook as before, so that was somehow of the negative thing about the crowd sourcing on Facebook.

So basically this task was based on the street name changes in Durban. Many of the major streets in Durban have been renamed to honour heroes of the liberation struggle. this commenced back in 2012.the main issue here or rather the focus was how ordinary citizens feel about the changing of the street names, taking into consideration that they used the names of Liberation struggle heroes. With September being heritage month and 2014 being the year we as South Africans celebrate 20 years into democracy, we wanted to find out if citizens regard the new names or they still use the old street names.

We chose Broad+ Grey Street, which is now called Dr. Yusuf Dadoo, with this combination; to be honest I did not even know that they were combining to be named as one street under Dr. Yusuf dadoo. This kind of ignorance in me made me question- if other people were aware of the combination or Dr Yusuf Dadoo himself especially since these two streets are one of the busiest in Durban...

We took a walk from Broad all the way to Grey Street, just observing the street in general, the businesses there and everything around. It is quite full of crime and that is another reason why we could not take shots feeling safe because we were scared that someone would steal the camera. 

We only secured one interview because people refused to talk to us, let alone speak on camera. The interviewee we got agreed to speak to us- off camera, we had to use what we could get and we used his voice as a voice over in our video.

I have already mentioned the challenges we had and they were so minor to the extent that we actually did enjoy the experience, especially combining our television and interviewing skills into one subject. 

News Package

While going through the study guide in the beginning of the year, I came across this subject " New Media" and it was quite interesting in a confusing way but I got in the first class  and i just knew that I would love it, mainly because I want to pursue my professional Journalism career in the print media path.

My News Package was based on the elections and was mainly focusing on the "Born Frees" because it was quite significant that they are not only turning 20 this year- in line with our Democracy but it was also their first democratic vote. It was also about the current political system in South Africa and how much it has improved.

What I enjoyed most about this assignment was that I had to interact with my social cedia friends.  It did not even feel like  that much work or an assignment at all because I had to use my Facebook to get people's opinions. However, most people regard Facebook as a platform where only fun is to be had and if you post thought-provoking status messages or opinions, people tend to ignore it because they do not regard what you are posting as fun. So what I did not enjoy the most about this assignment was that as much as some people actually gave attention to my posts, some would just send me private messages on how they find what I am asking my Facebook friends as irrelevant. I then had to explain that it is for school and I was doing it for marks, that was quite my only challenge.

When selecting my story angle, I did not find it as an obstacle because I was aiming on focusing on something that is current and something that most people think about, so I somehow made their thoughts a reality by bringing it out there and making them voice their so long kept close opinions about our 20 years of democratic freedom and how they think the overall elections will go especially for the first time voters. This was a combination of how the born frees think that they deserved to be called "born frees"- whether they are really free or they are in love with the idea of sharing the same number of years with the country's democracy.

As for the interviews, well that was quite easy because I knew my target market because I am also in their age- range so it was quite easy to interact with them seeing that this democratic vote was significant for both me and my interviewees. I took my picture for my News Package on the day of the elections- 7 May 2014, because i found it relevant to capture the young South Africans in action of making their marks at the polling station in my institution at the Ritson Campus.
 
Overall, it was quite a great experience for me, I enjoyed this assignment- flaws and all and I learnt a lot of things during the process, which includes creating a poll on Facebook. Trust me, I have been on Facebook for four years now and I only learnt that during this task. Next time I might use Twitter for my crowd sourcing but I am skeptical about the 140-character rule even though it would be nice to view people's opinions on a different social media platform.