The Guardian has launched an amazingly innovative and challenging three-year experiment with a project known as Katine: it starts with a village.

Katine is a small village in Uganda, "a place that has received little assistance in the past and suffers from the common African problems of poverty, poor health, partial education, unreliable water supplies, a fragile economy, and sporadic conflict". The Guardian says this project is in response to appeals from its readers for a long-term financial commitment to support HIV/AIDS clinics in Africa. With this new model, the newspaper hopes to connect the ideas, goodwill, resources and expert knowledge of 15-million readers around the world and focus them on one problem.

(Introductory remarks at a conference on National Media Freedom Day, October 19, which commemorated the banning 30 years ago of the World, Weekend World and Voice newspapers.)

My 21st year on this planet coincided with the time that the Pretoria government dropped ten thousand tons of bricks on South Africa, by outlawing all Black Consciousness organisations as well as three newspapers.

Three cheers and more for Andrew Trench for the yellow ribbon of press freedom.

He's deputy editor of the Daily Dispatch and leader of their investigative team, and he's speaking at a Rhodes commemoration of National Press Freedom Day on Friday 19th.

I'll be in Joburg at an SABC-SANEF seminar talking about media freedom in the context of balancing rights (dignity and privacy, on one hand VS free speech on the other).

LIBERALS and lefties alike have deplored reports of the imminent arrest of SA’s top editor and his deputy as the latest example of an authoritarian offensive by President Mbeki’s oligarchy against a critical press. Pish tosh. This case may actually do journalism more good than harm.

A rude awakening in the news that Vodacom is becoming a media company.

It's not about the firm's distribution of a bouquet of other people's TV via 3G (and in future DVB-H). It's not even about content as such.