TWITTER AS THE REPORTING TOOL

We have witnessed different strikes in South Africa but on the 16^th August the country witnessed the most violent strike since the end of Apartheid , which it is reported that 34 miner workers at Lonmin Marikana were gunned down by Police after they were violently attacking the police which resulted in 2 Police Officers losing their lives. The strike erupted as the management and the mine workers couldn’t agree on salary increase the workers stopped working and assaulting those who are working while others are fighting for the increase.

This accident saw the South Africa police service turn into the South African police "army" when they shot dead 44 Lomnin platinum mine workers on the 16th of august. A lot of questions were asked about; the usage of live ammunition by the police service; who started firing; who is responsible, and this resulted in the president of the country calling for the commission of enquiry to look at the matter before anyone can entirely take the blame. But it was believed they used live ammunition because the miners were too violent and were over powering all those measures that SAPS tried to use.

Many journalists from and abroad covered the event but on my piece I will be looking to some twitter reporting from South Africa well-known Journalists. On my little research i will be using this journalists, The-Star Journalist Tau Poloko , 702 Reporter Barry Bateman and big media company E-news, they were all covering the event but they tackle and use different reporting skills to this Marikana strike.

As I was going through twitter, I can say Tau Poloko is the one giving too much information about the strike as he is reporting live from Marikana. On his twitter page one can easily tell he is using his account not just a normal citizen but more as a journalist as he tries not to be subjective on the event since it started. He gives out every single detail about the event , he know many people depend on him for updates as he work for big independent newspaper. At the end his twitter usage a tool to cover the event worked as news were easily distributed through social media as many twitter users usual retweet his Lonmin Tweets.

At the other hand E-news as the Broadcasting Media House, it doesn’t give every details about the strike but it gives out all the important details and developments .It doesn’t give every details like Poloko did e.g.on one of Poloko Tweets he tweeted that “women at Marikana are happy because their husbands are back” but E-news only tweeted about the serious issues like “Marikana Miners workers are realeased from Jail”. I think E-news as a channel it doesn’t gives out every detail because journalists working for E-news have already twittered all those things as they are live from Marikana so their job is to report solid news which people will be interested to watch on TV.

Barry’s information is very reliable but what makes him less believable from Poloko is that the latter was at the place when the whole thing happened and Barry entirely depended on his sources for that information, which is not bad at all but it will always be ideal to report from the place and he is more like E-news as he only tweet about the important development of Lonmin Marikana Strike

NEW MEDIA HAVE CHANGE OUR LIVES IN MANY WAYS SINCE ITS FIRST DAY OF EXISTANCE

One can say the birth of internet was early 1990s even though it was brought ages ago , I’m saying this because by the 1990s many people were able to use the internet through Internet Explore and Netscape with search engines like google and yahoo at the other side to assist people to gather information in the easy way.

Internet have accommodated so many people since the 1990s as in today’s life everything is seem to be done by the internet and by 2006 1.076 billion Internet users world wide . Internet users have increased rapidly as in 1991 only 376 000 but now its billions ,the growth is so fast which is good because it shows people are moving with digital technology. As internet users increase the internet itself is also not the same as 17 years back by that time it use to take time to download an audio but now it’s a few seconds thing.

New media (the internet)has helped people to communicate no matter of the distance unlike cellphone where one is charged etra cash for communicating with someone abroad with internet is the very cheap this can be through the e-mails and other web related communication. As we all know that in today’s life time is the only thing that matters so the speed of internet help us to save time as things like researches which we use to use textbook can be done easily with internet

Who said buying Rovers you have to go to the USA?that’s not true trade are being done online and no need to stand on those long quees in the banks ..you can do it while you sitting watching tv at home through internet …internet is here to change our life for good!

INVESTIGATION ON ONLINE NEWS AND JOURNALISM

There are things that I have found out while I was doing my investigation on online news here in South Africa. On line my investigation I used two privately owned news organizations which are News24 and Times Live and at the other hand I used SABC which is South African Public Broadcaster.

In all these three news organizations  there  are lot of common things , on all home pages when I open on top of the page is a top story then in the middle news are grouped in order , on top is South Africa stories then followed by African stories and the last is the Internationally stories (World).

News24 and Times Live are more the same because while I was doing my investigation the top story was the same on both news organizations (Malema’s story) but I think Times Live is the best because it uses more videos in their stories compared to News24, when I was checking News24 only got videos for Super sports on their home page while Times Live almost got video for every story.

Both News24 and Times Live got column where bloggers can blog about latest issues and the design for blog column is more the same as it is found on the bottom of the page in both news organization , while the two I mentioned above got column for blogs it doesn’t mean one can find blog column on SABC  website , there is none!

All the three news organizations are moving with technology because all of them can be joined through some well-known social networks like Facebook and Twitter. They can be joined on these social networks and when whenever there is breaking news all those who have joined will get the news on their Facebook and Twitter accounts.

Both News24 and Times Live are more like a newspaper because there got place on their home page where there client can advertise their product but on SABC homepage there is no section for advertisement.

SABC as a public Broadcaster I can say they are sometimes outdated coz on their homepage they still got State of Nation Address as one of the top stories and now the SONA is almost week old. All the news organizations always got their financial reporting (JSE) on the middle section of their homepage and it is always on the right-hand side. The only thing that seems to be good about SABC is that they got audio on top of their homepage on some of their top stories and other news organizations got no audio news they got videos

One thing that makes me to say Times Live is the best is by the way the have developed their site, when I was going down I realized they also have links  for the top newspapers they are associated with, which are Sowetan Live , The Herald and Daily Dispatch and on the top of the page they also got  an option where one can click to see all the videos uploaded on that day .

 www.sabcnews.co.za/

www.timeslive.co.za/

www.news24.com/