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.

Popularity: 15% [?]

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.

Popularity: 10% [?]

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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The headlines tell us of the horror to come. "Raped, raped…and raped again" reads the first and tells us how:

A month ago a 22-year-old woman gave birth to a baby girl conceived by a man who raped her. This week she was raped again, this time by two men. Not even an hour after that, a third man she thought was a Good Samaritan who had come to help her, raped her again.

The horror is unimaginable. As this poor woman says an interview with my newspaper: "Men are dangerous and to me they are creatures who are here to destroy women". I felt ashamed to be a man when I read this story. It was a hard story to lead the newspaper with. The crime is grotesque, the inhumanity chilling.

And if that was not enough later we are confronted with "Girl’s headless body found", a story about the discovery of a missing teenagers headless corpse at a scene near King William’s Town where a young woman was brutally raped and stabbed more than 30 times last year, a story which at the time lead my newspaper. Of course the girl had been raped before being killed and mutilated. It would have been surprising if she was not.

Ironically, her body was discovered while a TV crew were filming an insert for crime-busting TV on the earlier rape. You see, the gang of men arrested for that crime had been released after delays in processing DNA tests. They have never been seen again.

It tears my heart out as an editor to have to run such stories in my newspaper. Why not simply ignore them, you might ask, and, in fact, some readers do ask this. But what would it say about us if we relegated "Raped, raped… and raped again" to an inside page nib? I think it would make us complicit with the rapists.

So tell me, has morality disappeared or are we all simply going mad?

Andrew Trench is editor of the Daily Dispatch in East London

Popularity: 8% [?]

Here’s a lesson is innovative, compelling online presentation of a big  story. The Telegraph in the UK has done some fab, funny picture galleries of the MP’s expenses scandal. Check out the gallery of  the most bizarre 25 claims (from match boxes to duck houses to a copy of “Windows XP for Dummies”). Great stuff and there’s no need to read the words.

Down south in South Africa, the Daily Dispatch did some simple but highly effective design for their lead story today on the mayor’s spending spree with her official credit card (a lot of take-out in East Londion before she jetted off to Turkey and splurged on clothes and leather goods). In the print edition of the paper, they listed the purchases with dates and figures in a cut-out. It’s a bit lost in the online version and I suggest they project it a bit more as that little list is the most fascinating thing about the story. Nevertheless, nice one guys! Click here to go to the Dispatch story.

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The Daily Dispatch’s veteran hack Eddie Botha has  such a fascinating two-part tale in the paper about  SA’s first hijacker who,  in 1972,  laid his hands on an SAA Boeing   to force Anglo American and De Beers to pay him money for missing diamonds he had recovered.

Botha has known Kamil for years and first came across him when he was Rapport’s news editor.

It truly is a rollicking adventure story from another age, with the hijacker Fouad Kamil, a.k.a. Flash Fred, landing himself and an assocaite in a Malawian jail for a few months after the then president, Hastings Banda, said: “Those thieves in the air, those gangsters, those fools will be left to rot and cool off in jail.”  We don’t get quotes like this anymore! Imagine George W Bush saying something so poetic about hijackers.

In a nutshell the story goes like this: Kamil felt he had been shortchanged by Anglo so he hijacked an SAA plane bound for Zimbabwe (then Rhodeisa) that was meant to have Harry Oppenheimer’s son-in-law on it. But it didn’t! The plane was forced to land in Malawi, where Kamil demanded that Oppenheimer meet him in Blantyre. If he didn’t, he threatend, he would blow up Anglo’s headquarters in Joburg and kidnap his daughter, Mary.

The plot was folied by the Boeing captain and Malawian troops and Kamil was arrested. Astonishingly, he only spent a few months in jail before Banda released him and a fellow hijacker, and told them personally that they were welcome to remain in Malawi. After that, Kamil moved to Sapin and later settled in Brazil. He has contiued to demand his money form Anglo and, in fact, did get a sizable amount after Oppenheimer sent an emissary to sort the matter out.

Oppenheimer even wrote Kamil a letter after he was posted a copy of his book, and the Dispatch has a copy!  Great reading for  a long weeked — it’s not just an extraordinary crime caper but an insight into the humble, generous Oppenheimer. Here are the links:

Part 1: Plan to seize Oppenheimer

Part 2: Harry offered me more

Popularity: 16% [?]

Newspapers are such fun places to work, filled with cantankerous, creative people who get on each other’s nerves but who also become firm friends for life. Part of this goes back to newspapers’ traditional attraction to curious, oddball personalities who would find it hard to fit into more straightened corporate cultures.

Even though they project the image of respectability these days, most papers are still filled with quirky people. Here’s a great blog on peculiar newspaper traditions by the Daily Dispatch’s editor (who is also my husband), Andrew Trench. Click here to read. He wrote it after being informed of a Dispatch election night tradition compelling the editor to provide whisky and milk for all the sub-editors. That’s hard to beat but I’ve encountered a few merry traditions in my time in newspapers.

At the Cape Times in the the early 1990s, the day wasn’t complete for the news staff without nipping into the press club (and Indian restaurant across the road from Newspaper House) for drinks presided over by the sometimes imperious Di Cassere, a long-time hack at the paper.

As a helper to the Stone sub at the Sunday Times, I would srink into myself with fear as the tyrannical editor Ken Owen would come with the Page One designer Dennis Hands every Saturday night to peer over the shoulder of the poor hapless stripper tasked with doing the front page. Mr Owen (because that’s how we addressed him) would be demanding that things be changed and fiddling about with minute spacing. Dennis, cool as a cucumber, would quietly be easing the way, giving the stripper pointers on how to please the boss.

But the things I remember most fondly are all the little interactions and rituals of everyday office life. Brian MacLean, the Dispatch sports editor, filling the office every lunch time with the smell of fish and chips. Bantering with Lukanyo Mnyanda and Daniel Thole at Business Day until a rather uptight middle manager would pointedly shut her office door in the afternoons to shut out our noise. The way the Dispatch chief sub, Sylvia Haggerty, would take out her crystal ash tray out of her draw at 11.30pm as we marched towards deadline and quietly puff away without anyone saying a word (this just after smoking in offices was outlawed). What a class act!

Popularity: 6% [?]

There’s only one story today: the election results and how the online media is responding. Everybody’s got the story that by 8.30am this morning, the ANC had 63.7% (2 078 352 votes) – with the largest total of votes coming from the Eastern Cape (503 730) — the DA 19.5% (636,637 votes) and Cope only 7.7% (251 200 votes).

Most of the parties’ Facebook pages are silent and the IEC’s website is not loading, possibly because of the the number of hits on it.

It’s hard to beat the immediacy of TV and radio on this one but News24 seems to have the best online package of the big online media houses, with a cool little map of SA showing the results as they come in (the Western Cape is going to the DA, the rest are sticking with the ANC). Click here to go there.

My favourite story of the past two days, however, goes to the Daily Dispatch, which ran a reader competition of people’s memories of the 1994 election. I actually got a lump in my thoat when I read this one, about a reader’s memory of his grandfather voting for the first time.

The Dispatch’s election page is also much more lively than most, with an video interviews of young people talking about the election. Each video is embedded into a Google interactive map. Nice! Click here to interract.

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You gotta love the weird things that go on in the lullies of South Africa. Perusing my local newspaper, the Daily Dispatch, today with an eye out for the April Fools’ joke, I came across these two stories. Can you tell which is the joke:

1. A story about a Transkei man who claims he was shot dead in taxi violence in 2001 and has come back from the dead, drawing loads of fans who are walking miles to hear his tale of being abducted by witches after his funeral. Family members later found him wondering the streets of Ngqeleni viilage and took him home. Read the full story here.

or

2. The story saying ANC Youth League president Julius Malema is planning on building a R50-m mansion styled on Michael Jackson’s Neverland ranch in East London. Read full story here.

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Popularity: 16% [?]