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.