The Daily Dispatch in East London is truly doing the most innovative web journalism in South Africa and, yep, you may say I’m biased as I worked there (twice) and am married to the ed but, guys, you have to check out their latest offering: “The struggle continues”.

The Dispatch does it again...

This time around, the paper took a group of Rhodes students and put them to work with video cameras and notebooks on the streets of East London for a week to find out more about the other half: the street kids, the folk who go through your rubbish, the artisans. There’s blog diaries, video interviews, slide shows. It is all so interesting and so easy to navigate as there are no long tracts of text yet it give you a real insight into the lives of these people. Really compelling. I loved the slide show of the street kids – with pics taken by the kids themselves with a disposable camera.

Finding out that the guys who go through your rubbish bags are part of an organised though informal recycling scheme was fascinating. Hence forth, I’ll be putting out all my plastic bottles separately for them to pick up more easily.

And all done on a shoestring on WordPress, the free blogging platform — no million-rand CMS in sight.

Well done, guys — Jan, Rudi, Sino, Tegan, the spouse and the students, whom you can tell are very comfortable with multimedia. They also look like they had loads of fun. As Anton Harber said of the last Dispatch online project (on RDP housing in the province), this is the future of journalism and it makes me proud that the little old Dispatch is the pathfinder.

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