Investigative journalism is sexy in South Africa again –and that’s a good thing for journalism and the country –but mounting big national investigations is easier said than done. Neither of the new investigative units set up last year by Media24 and Independent Newspapers have too much to show for themselves as yet and we will see what big stories the Mail & Guardian’s new amaBhungane investigative unit will come up with.

Rob Rose's Sunday Times splash.

I would venture that specialised investigative units tend to battle as any seasoned hack will tell you that the big stories come from the little stories, the bits and pieces you pick up as you interview people and get to know sources better. Often these are extraneous to the story at hand and mentioned as an aside or offered as a fruity little piece of gossip.

So it is heartening and exciting that an investigation involving journalists across the country and from different media houses into conflicts of interest in the preparation for the Soccer World Cup has produced such excellent results. Funded by the Open Society Foundation for South Africa and run by the Institute for Security Studies (ISS), the investigations have resulted in a book – which is a fascinating peek into the dodgy dealings masked by SA’s opaque tender system –and big breaking stories in the participating newspapers at the time of the books’s launch. (Click here to read the book, “Player and Referee: Conflicting Interests and the 2010 FIFA World Cup”, which is free online at the ISS’s website.)

Among other things, the journalists involved – Rob Rose of the Sunday Times; Eddie Botha and Gcina Ntsaluba at the Daily Dispatch; the Mail & Guardian’s Sam Sole and Stefaans Brummer; freelancer Karen Schoonbee and the British anti-Fifa crusader Andrew Jennings – unearthed:

Eddie Botha's Daily Dispatch splash.

• That the City of Johannesburg has effectively ceded the profits of  the Soccer City stadium to a little known stadium-management company and the possibility of empowerment fronting at the company. (Click here to read the Sunday Times splash by Rose that came out of the investigation.)

• Irregularities surrounding the awarding of World Cup advertising and branding by the Eastern Cape Tourism Board, the suspension of a board employee suspected of being a whistle-blower and allegations of bribery involved in the construction of the Mthatha stadium that was being touted as a possible base camp. (Click here to read the Daily Dispatch splash by Botha produced by the investigation.) …

Click here to read the rest of this column, at Wits University’s Journalism School’s website, journalism.co.za. Called “Backstory”, this new column will appear twice a month at jocoza (love that name!) and will focus on the story behind the story: How the hacks get — and sometimes don’t get — their stories.

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The Witness' website

To put up the wall or not… that is the question facing all newspapers today as they wrestle with the online paywall issue. On the one hand, putting all your newspaper’s content on the web for free may well cull the circulation of your physical print product and if you can’t generate enough advertising on your site to even cover its costs, then a paywall seems the best route.  On the other hand, by creating a paywall the number of website users may dwindle to such an extent, that you’ll end up heading off to the digital equivalent of Nowhereville.

This week in my Bizcommunity column, I wrote about Avusa’s plans to put up paywalls on its Eastern Cape titles, The Herald in Port Elizabeth and the Daily Dispatch in East London — possibly in the next three months. This move spells the first of the big three media houses with serious online presences — Avusa, Media24 and Independent Newspapers — to experiment with a paywall.

But the very first South African broadsheet to go this route — albeit with a partial paywall — was actually  The Witness based in Pietermartizburg.

The Witness, which is 50% owned by Media24, blocked access to its unique KZN content (and not to more generic wire copy covering national and international news) in November last year. The aims were modest: to generate enough income to bolster its very small web operation rather than to make loads of profit. Even so the step wasn’t taken lightly and the paper’s deputy editor, Yves Vanderhaeghen who also oversees the online operation, wrote this piece in November explaining the move to the paper’s readers and website users.

This week, I asked Yves for an update on how their paywall experiment was going, six months down the line, and he had this rather heartening message for others about to step boldly into the paywall arena:

Contrary to what was predicted, The Witness’s website traffic has not plummeted into the depths of obscurity. Where there were usually 5500 unique users per day without the paywall, the daily average has dropped and plateau’d at an average of 4100, while the average time on the website has increased from 6 minutes to 13 minutes. There is a measure that some people stay on the website for hours, thus skewing the graph… but this was the same before the implementation of a paid-for subscription system.

Classifieds is still most readers’ port of call on the site (33000 of the 95000 visits last month). The habits of online users still seem to indicate that readers are interested in getting a brief overview of the day’s news – as even articles which are not marked with a ‘P’ (i.e. paid-for content) are not clicked on as much as those marked with a ‘P’.

Comments and feedback have decreased, and now the majority of the comments come in forums of debate (letters, features) rather than as an immediate response to news – which has now been clamped down with the paywall. The plus side is that it has reduced what would often be a wave of obscene comments to an aggravating news story, which would generally need careful pruning, if they were at all usable (swear words, racism, etc).

Now, isn’t this interesting, people?  It seems it’s not all gloom and doom and there is indeed a proportion of people out there in the ether prepared to pay for content. The fact that The Witness still allows free access to the national and international wire copy may be a key part of the puzzle. I’d be keen to hear your thoughts on the issue.

Click here to read an earlier column of mine at Moneyweb, in February 2010, about The Witness’ move.

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Until Twitter came along and blew the lid off news coverage of the Iranian elections last year, many of us were scratching our heads wondering just how social media could help journalism to be more interesting. Sure, Facebook helped you market a story to your buddies and you could pick up a story or two on Twitter but what else was there? Then the Iranians, armed with cellphones, beat the pants off the international news organisations covering the June protests in Tehran and we all sat up and took notice. In South Africa, social media also steals the spotlight from traditional media from time to time. Here are my favourite examples:

1.  Viral sensation

When AWB leader Andre Visagie stormed out of a live e.tv panel discussion this month, it went viral in a big way with every news organisation, blogger and his dog embedding it. At last count just one iteration of the clip had had 267 000 hits on YouTube and the hilarious “Don’t Touch me on my Studio” clip was also quickly remixed into a number of spoof vids. On the very same day ANC Youth League president Julius Malema threw BBC hack Jonah Fisher out of a press conference – another a big hit – but the prize for  enduring appeal must surely go to Parliament’s finance portfolio committee chairman, Nhlanhla Nene, who vanished behind a desk after his chair collapsed on live TV in 2008.  It was inevitable that someone at the SABC would release the video on YouTube and Zoopy.  Word got around on Facebook  and very soon the rather un-amused Nene was an internet celebrity. Even venerable institutions such as the BBC covered it (without being able to resist embedding the vid themselves, of course). Today one version of the Nene clip has had more than 3.1-million views on YouTube.  I, of course, can’t resist putting it up again:

VERDICT: Content that captures the imagination takes on a life of its own, thanks to the power of social media and networks. Media organisations can learn from this.

2. Sack me!

When a fire raged across Devil’s Peak in Cape Town one night in March last year, the big news websites such as IOL, News24 and The Times were laughably far behind the local bloggers and Twitter users. While the salaried hacks were snoozing in their beds, the bloggers were standing on their rooves, taking photos and running down to their laptops to convey all the drama. “The fire engines are pouring out of the fire station on Roeland Street,” wrote blogger Chris M. “The sirens are going crazy, my flat smells of smoke and I can’t open the windows, because bits and pieces of ash are flying too quickly through the air! Compelling stuff – and then there were the riveting tweets by panicked people being ordered out of their homes by emergency services in Cape Town’s City Bowl as the fire came closer. My favourite came from geekrebel: “Oh sack! Fire is 3 blocks up! We’re evacuating our house now! Now… about a hotel where we can take dog…” (Here’s a tip: Type “fuck” into your phone and see what predicative text makes of it.) News24 seemed to beat the rest of the big boys and finally got something up round about 10.30 the next day.

VERDICT: Social networks like Twitter and independent bloggers show how anyone can be a witness to news and convey the power of their own story – even with a tweet.

3. Dinosaur huge

In January, a Zimbabwean on holiday in Cape Town was killed by a Great White in Fish Hoek and a number of witnesses tweeted  the horror attack instantly. The Twitter grapevine alerted journalists, who sprung into action, and Fish Hoek resident Gregg Coppen became the most quoted witness of the event after tweeting: “Holy shit. We just saw a GIGANTIC shark eat what looked like a person in front of our house in Fishoek, Unbelievable.” A few minutes later he texted: “That shark was HUGE. Like dinosaur huge”. That last phrase made it into a couple of headlines in the daily rags – an excellent example of how Twitter allows ordinary people to capture powerfully the drama of an event as it unfolds. Had a reporter tracked down Mr Coppen in the pre-tweet world, it would have been many hours after the attack and he probably would been quoted saying something like: “We were really stunned to see the attack…The shark was really big.”  Not half as expressive…

VERDICT: See above

4. ET is dead

Eugene Terre’Blanche’s death on a dead quiet Saturday night over the Easter weekend was broken on Twitter by blogger FromTheOld  and picked up by 702s’s Aki Anastasiou and then Mail & Guardian editor Nic Dawes tweeted it. In an analysis of the how the news of ET’s death got out, Memeburn’s Simon Hartley says the breaking news  went viral fast, with activity only tapering off  in the early hours of Sunday morning. Most of the Sunday papers remade their papers and got the story on to their front pages for the next morning. Maybe they didn’t break it but they had all the gory details and put it in the context of Julius Malema’s “Kill the Boer” antics.

VERDICT: Hartley pronounces this lesson for traditional media: “Predict the news cycle, don’t run with it and try and compete with Twitter, rather use Twitter for what it is, and then offer what Twitter can’t – carefully crafted, hard-hitting paragraphs of insight and analysis of the event”. I agree up to a point but feel the Sunday papers could have got value out of tweeting the breaking news themselves. (See Number 6 below)

5. Oops

There was much hand-wringing about journalism ethics and privacy on social networks when Tokyo Sexwale’s niece landed up in The Citizen newspaper after she mouthed off about the president on Facebook in February. “Why does our President display such stereotypical bad behaviour of a randy black womaniser?” wrote Kananelo Sexwale after the Jacob Zuma “Babygate” story broke. “I feel ashamed.” A mini-media storm ensued, with media commentators questioning whether plonking a Facebook comment on to the printed page  was ambush journalism and there were arguments for and against the expectations of privacy on social media sites. Sexwale later apologised to Zuma but not before the nation got a fascinatingly frank glimpse of a BEE blueblood’s opinion on our leader’s controversial behaviour.

VERDICT: Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg says privacy is dead. He’s right.

6. Objection!

The Daily Dispatch newspaper in East London sent their online news editor off to cover a murder trial on Twitter last year. The case was a gobsmacker in its own right – a mother who strangled her two daughters to death before trying unsuccessfully to kill herself. The tweets followed the cut and thrust of the court action in real time. It was an experiment and not all liked it but hats off to the little paper for venturing into new territory. Here is Dispatch editor Andrew Trench’s analysis of the experiment.

VERDICT: Social media gives traditional media the chance to experiment. Even a newspaper can do live breaking news.

* This article appeared first on Memeburn.

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The usually quiet seaside suburb of Gonubie in East London (yep, that’s where I live) became the scene of an impromptu “bull run” on Friday afternoon, reports Msindisi Fengu at the Dispatch. This after a bull, which was to be slaughtered in a traditional ceremony at a house, managed to escape and made a run for safety.Fengu shot the following video, edited by DispatchOnline’s Sino Majangaza. Click here to read the full story.

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It’s been a strange and dramatic news week in SA, with the murder of AWB leader Eugene Terre’Blanche dominating the news. There were also some Far Side moments, chief among them these two videos – of ANC Youth League leader descending into a Mugabe-style rant in a press conference when BBC journalist Jonah Fisher called Malema on castigating MDC leaders for working in Sandton instead of Zim. The plucky hack pointed out that Malema himself is a comfy resident of that Afro-Tuscan suburb. He got thrown out of the press conference for his troubles:

We also saw a hilarious scene on live TV at e.tv with the AWB’s Andre Visagie got into a little fracas with the presenter. I don’t know which is funnier – the AWB man’s smirking bodyguard, Visagie or the presenter yelling: “You don’t touch me on my studio”:

On a more serious note, there was much hand wringing over the state of the country’s race relations post Terre’Blanche’s death in the context of Malema’s inflammatory behaviour of the past month. I think political analyst Peter Vale produced the most thoughtful piece I came across. Click here to read at the Daily Dispatch and here’s an excerpt:

…whatever politicians say to the contrary, nation-building is complicated. Simple dogma once championed by Terre’B lanche and, more recently, advocated by Julius Malema says nothing about the rich (but truly brutal) underbelly of South Africa’s past. Due to this, their words are emptied of any understanding, let alone explanation, of the human experience in the North West Province…

Click here to read the full piece.

Then there is an absolutely fascinating story, out today, of  Wits paleontologist Professor Lee Berger and his nine-year-old son, Matthew, discovering the fossil of a new hominid species, Australopithecus sediba, at a newly discovered cave site in the Cradle of Humankind in Gauteng. The prof and his son set off on the investigation of the cave after noodling around with  the navigation facility and high-resolution satellite imagery in Google Earth.

Most SA’s websites have the story but, once again I’m going to refer you to the Daily Dispatch — my local newspaper in East London which unfailingly shows its finely-honed nose for news. The Dispatch ran a much more comprehensive version of the story compared with the big websites. The latter  missed out on the fascinating Google Earth angle.  This is a BIG scientific story — hugely significant in paleontology, which is the study of our human origin — and serendipitosly reminds us of mankind’s common African roots at a time when the country (post-Terre’Blanche’s murder) is more preoccupied with what what divides rather than unites us. Click here to read the Dispatch story.

The last story of the week is not a story but a lively, interesting new website in South Africa well worth checking out if you’re even vaguely interested in media – new and old – and all things tech.

New-media guru Matthew Buckland launched Memeburn, SA’s answer to Mashable and TechCrunch, last week and it’s cooking. It’s very nicely designed with loads of interesting, informative  stories — none too long but with a pleasingly jaunty voice. There are wide range of writers and it’s kudos to Matthew for being able to twist so many writers’ arms (myself included) to contribute for free while he works on getting the revenue model up and running. We’re all doing it because Matthew is a very savvy entrepreneur and a  lekker oke to boot.  Click here to check Memebun  out.

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There’s a fascinating break on the Eugene Terre’Blanche story from an unlikely quarter — the Daily Dispatch in East London. Or perhaps it’s not so unlikely.

The paper’s veteran reporter and investigations editor Eddie Botha called around Ventersdorp yesterday to discover that the murder could well have taken place earlier than what the police have been saying. Ventersdorp paramedics chief Robert van Heerden, who went to Terre’Blanche’s farm after being called shortly before 7pm, said that Terre’Blanche had been dead for quite some time when he first saw him and added: “All I can say is that the scene, which I saw, did not make any sense.”

Another Venterdorp dominee said he believed (from what he had been told by paramedics) that TerreBlanche could have been killed as early as 3pm.

Botha also interviewed Reverend Armond van Zyl of the Afrikaanse Protestantse Kerk  in Ventersdorp, who said that Terre’Blanche’s wife had told him she had spoken to her husband earlier that day and he had said he was not staying on the farm that night. The couple’s home was in town and Terre’Blanche would go out to the farm every second night.

Click here to read the Dispatch story.

So curious questions about the course of events at the farm that day and one has to wonder what the police investigators have been up to. It seems the police took the time of death (between 5pm and 6pm) from what the two accused told them and haven’t checked out other sources of information and evidence.

But, for me, it also raises questions about the quality of media reporting on the murder. Every major news organisation has had reporters in Ventersdorp all week and none of them has unearthed what Eddie did in a couple of hours on the telephone. It’s a real indictment of the quality of journalism in our country as it seems the hysteria around making the connection between Terre’Blanche’s murder and Julius Malema has seen editors and news editors across the land take their collective eye off the ball. Sies!

Eddie, a good friend with whom I have had the pleasure of working with at the Dispatch, is a really experienced news hound and I look forward to more stories from him as he heads off to Ventersdorp today. But he didn’t pull a magic bunny  out of the hat here. He started with covering the basics — talking to people connected to the murder victim and people around the investigation beyond the police spokesman. It is truly astonishing that he is the first to do so – five days after the story broke!

Another bleeding obvious story to do (which I haven’t seen yet in the media but let me know If I missed it) is a portrait of Terre’Blanche’s recent life in Ventersdorp. He dropped off the national stage utterly when he went to prison and we know nothing of what he was like and what he was doing afterwards.

Had he moved on from politics, leading a quiet life in a farming town? Was trying to resusitate the AWB? What kind of husband and father was he? Was he involved in the Kerk? What was his financial situation? Did he drink at the local bar and what did he talk about when he was there? What kind of farm boss was he? What did the farm workers think of him?

On another surprising and more amusing front, there was a ruckus live on e.tv last night when AWB secretary general André Visagie stormed out of a discussion after heckling from political commentator Lebohang Pheko and a bit of pushing and shoving between himself and presenter Chris Maroleng. Note Visage’s highly amused and ineffectual bodyguard in the background in the video:

It all goes to show why the AWB eventually became an isolated movement worthy of  farce. Sure, Visagie was being heckled but dealing with that in a calm, commanding fashion is a prerequisite for being a politician.

As they say, if you want to run with the hounds, you can’t piss with the puppies. And, frankly, the same goes for  the reporters knocking about Ventersdorp all week.

Click here to read the News24 story on the e.tv ruckus.

Click here to read my earlier post on how Terre’Blanche’s death has set SA off on a major soul searching on the race relations and the state of our nation.

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Men’s Health had a great story this week about two South African surfers who happened to be in Sumatra when the big quake hit. It’s cool to see a magazine get a break on a big story like this and they played it perfectly: a first-person account of the disaster. It also produces the quote of the week, from one of the surfer bunnies, Andrew Brady, from Cape Town:

I locked eyes with Greame during the most violent part of the quake and the feeling of “oh f#ckness” was mutual as the buildings around us began to collapse!

Then off to disaster of another kind: when one man’s unbuntu get’s a kick in the teeth. The Daily Dispatch had a story about a man who help a house warming party in the burbs to get to know his neighbours and ended up being attacked in his bedroom by two goons. What is this world coming to? A very sad barometer of out violent times.

And then Carl Hiaasen, eat your heart out! The Jackie Selebi trial is turning out to be THE soap opera of the year. Everyday this week there have been new accusations of dodgy intentions, dirt and corruption. What amuses me is the image of Glenn Agliotti cruising Sandton for shoes for Selebi and Thabo Mbeki. What kind of a crook  is this, for heaven sake? Doesn’t he have a wife or a flusie of some kind to do the shopping of bribery wares for him? Click here to go to the M&G’s very nicely presented special report on the trial.

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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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by Dave Macgregor

The smoking life. This is not Dave Macgregor...he has a goat

I met god – with a little “g” – three months ago when I decided to finally kick a butt burning addiction that has cost me thousands of Rands over the past 25 years.
An average of 20 ciggies a day, 365 and a quarter days a year for 25 years, you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to realize how much I have wasted since I sucked my first “cancer stick” – long before I even started shaving.
What the hell…I would have could have should have been a tycoon if I did not spend hundreds of thousands of hard earned clams on puffing.

Nobody held a gun to my head and – yes – I did know every smoke was “another nail in your coffin.”

But still I puffed.

I convinced myself I was so hooked, I would literally walk miles to buy some twak – no matter how poor I was – always fearing that if I did not get my nicotine fix I would climb walls.

Or so I thought.

It was so bad, I would be reaching for my smokes and lighting up – even before I realized what I was doing.

Before going to bed every night, I would make sure I had at least two “skyfs” left for the morning, one with a cup of mocca java – cos everybody knows it “tastes better” like that.

What a joke.

I found that all out during a five hour quit smoking session with god with a little “g” – taking a puff break every 30 minutes, nogal.

If a friend of mine could kick her 80 a day habit with god with a little “g” I could nail down my much smaller addiction.

Five hours later I realized how much smoking really sucked and stopped.

After huffing and puffing my way through 25 years of my life, the past three months have been the best.

Hooked as a teenager, 90 days after I had my last smoke I am slowly starting to feel like a teenager again as my lungs get to grips with some fresh air for a change.

Pity about the prune faced wrinkles I got from sucking on a million smokes or more though…

The hacking morning cough has gone; the wheezing before falling asleep is not as audible as before and I can hike up hills without huffing and puffing.

The body is slowly adjusting to being given a second chance at life.

For years Malcolm Robinson was just another surfing buddy – who also smoked 30 plus a day.

Now he is “Little g”.

After several failed attempts to quit, Malcolm stumbled on Allen Carr’s Easyway to Stop smoking last year and is fast becoming a give-it-up guru.

Endorsed by major medical aid companies – with a money back guarantee if it does not work after three tries – I kicked it on the first attempt.

Not using any “nicotine substitutes” – like patches or sprays – or hypnotherapy, it is the sheer simplicity of the message that breaks down all the myths associated with smoking.

No shock tactics no horror pictures of tarred up lungs – just common sense.

I always thought I was hopelessly addicted until it was pointed out to me if it was so bad – how could I get eight solid hours of sleep a night?

Bingo.

A few more chirps like that and I did not want to smoke.

Eureka.

I now know coffee tastes much better without a smoke. A few puffs after a meal do not bring out the flavour.

“Little g” got hold of me and I really woke up and smelt the coffee…and really tasted my food

Forget the Iluminati and other conspiracy theories – the biggest hoax are the myths associated with smoking.

The joke is on us.

Sex may seem better after a smoke, but try kissing a mouth after 25 of those suckers and you will know what I mean.

I believed it all – until Malcom started his shpeel.

Every myth was met with a logical explanation and the smoke breaks started seeming a little pointless.

And, as promised I am not a miserable sod – even during the first week.

Nowdays my friends say that I am glowing. I can stand in a smoky room and not feel like a puff. I also do not feel like public enemy number 1.

Billed the “number one smoking cessation method in the world” – I have little reason to disagree.

When my son came home from school in tears after being shown the lungs of smokers – I knew I had to quit.

Thanks “Little g”

* Dave Macgregor is the wayward, surfing and butt-kicking correspondent for the Daily Dispatch in Port Alfred. He is also famous for adopting a goat while on a newspaper travel trip

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By ANDREW TRENCH

This morning I was greeted with the sad news of the sudden death of our colleague, political reporter Msimelelo Njwabane. He collapsed last night and passed away. He was 28.

His death has left myself and his colleagues at the paper in deep shock. In the band of brothers and sisters that make up a newspaper’s team the sudden loss of a colleague hurts. When a colleague the calibre of Msimelelo falls it hurts even more.

Msimelelo was a young reporter but he made up for inexperience with his larger-than-life passion and commitment to his work. He worked hard to tell the complex story of politics in the Eastern Cape, a political viper’s nest where the reporters stand in the frontline.

Along with colleague Mayibongwe Maqhina, Msimelelo drove our coverage of the emergence of Cope nationally and in the Eastern Cape. Their coverage resulted in recent record sales for the newspaper.

Of course, such coverage opened the paper up to charges of bias. The ANC and its allies accused myself, our reporters and the paper of bias – sometimes with deeply personal attacks on us. Our explanation that we were simply doing our jobs fell on deaf ears.

But the story changed as every story does and recent months have seen us leading the way in reporting on the fractures in Cope itself and Msimelelo was there at the frontline again right until the end.  His earlier critics must be scratching their heads today seeing their comfortable assumptions about him dashed.

Msimelelo was a political reporter who got his hands dirty. He didn’t report off policy statements and press releases. He got right down into the heart of a story – often to the chagrin of his subjects.

Recently he reported on how Cope spokesman Phillip Dexter and other top brass had to flee a pub in East London in the face of a mob of party dissidents. When the party complained about his report and his sources, Msimelelo pointed out that he had no sources – he was there and witnessed the event first hand.

Cope accused him of being pro-ANC. The ANC accused him of being pro-Cope. In fact, every party thought he carried a brief for another. I leave it to you to decide what that said about him.

But those of us that knew him understood where his heart lay. The truth would surprise many of his critics. But that’s his secret which we will keep. His own convictions were known to us and never mattered because he was a journalist above all else.

Msimelelo joined the Dispatch in January 2009 from Beeld where he had been an investigative and political reporter since 2007 after a year spent at City Press also working the political beat. He was an Eastern Cape boy who grew up Stutterheim and matriculated at Stutterheim High School. It was unusual for someone of his background to work at an Afrikaaans paper  but Msimelelo was not a usual person  finding his way into mainstream reporting through work with the Environmental Justice Networking Forum and the NuFarmer and African Entrepeneur publication.

As every reporter does in their career, he made some mistakes.

He blundered in a major report on an Eastern Cape vehicle tender deal which led to a significant front page apology by the newspaper and he felt the pain of our internal disciplinary procedures because of it. But he did not make excuses for this mistake. He admitted his shortcomings, stood tall and took it on the chin, vowing to be a better reporter.  He earned my respect for that and the politicians he wrote about could have learned something from his integrity.

I write this knowing that his colleagues will never forget him and I hope that others will know of what he achieved and the impact he made in his short career. I offered for any of his colleagues to take the day off if they needed to. They have declined. We know why and we know what Msimelelo would think about that.

His colleagues have laid flowers on his keyboard and they continue to work through their tears.

* Andrew Trench is the editor of the Daily Dispatch in East London. Click here to go to his blog.

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