Fourth-year journalism students from Rhodes University's New Media Lab are drumming up experience in blog writing and managing social media, and earning some money while doing so.The New Media Lab has partnered with My Digital Life (www.mydl.co.za), an online social media and blogging hub owned by business technology media company ITWeb.

Three journalism students at Rhodes University are the winners of the 2011 ITWeb Journalism Scholarship.
ITWeb continues its investment in fresh talent that combines excellent journalism skills with clear understanding of new media trends.

Masetshaba Mpete, Gregory Peake and Mallory Perrett - third-year journalism students at the Rhodes School of Journalism and Media Studies - are the winners of the ITWeb Journalism Bursary for 2011.

Educators need to refresh Journalism, Media and Communication Studies curricula to help make sense of a radically changing mediascape. This was the message to delegates from UNESCO's Centres of Journalism Excellence and Reference who attended a programme titled Capacitating COE's for Real-Time Journalism and Media Studies just ahead of the second World Journalism Educators' Congress.

New Media Lab lecturer, Jude Mathurine shared lessons from Rhodes' School of Journalism and Media Studies' own change to a converged curriculum. He called on delegates to consider three key ideas:

A partnership between UNESCO and the Rhodes University School of Journalism and Media Studies will put the spotlight on strengthening African journalism education in September 2009.

The joint activities planned over a week-long period are:
- A special training programme to empower African journalism teachers in using New Media, to be run by Rhodes expert lecturer Jude Mathurine.
- The participants will also join a research colloquium as part of the African preparations for the World Journalism Education Congress set down for Rhodes University in July 2010.

New Media Lab lecturer, Jude Mathurine is back from a lightning trip to Stuttgart, Germany where he presented a paper to the Africa Forum for Development.

Radio is being changed by the rise of digital communications – particularly those that are cellphone-based. Call-ins and live-reports are common, thanks to mobiles. SMS comments and polls are common. Twitter and Facebook (and Mxit in the case of Radio Grahamstown) integration allows for expanded interaction with audiences.

So, should radio itself go digital? To be sure some radio services are digital, being available to audiences live or downloaded on the Internet. But traditional dissemination via the airwaves is still analogue.

Frank la Rue, the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression, says that longstanding international standards for free speech in the offline world are entirely relevant to online speech.

And he argues that the related global standards for legitimate limitation of some kinds of speech apply equally to the online world.

South Africa is missing a trick or ten, thanks to our silo policy approach to broadcast and broadband.

You may have thought these two realms, which share the character of being "broad" - and more importantly, will share a digital character sooner rather than later, were a natural for convergent treatment.

It was the end of a long day for Kader Asmal, then Minister of Education. He'd wrestled with the disaster of schooling in the country, then had a long meeting with the South African National Editors Forum (Sanef). It was circa 2004, and I was part of the Sanef delegation. The memory came to me this week when hearing the news of his death.

Our request for the Sanef meeting with the Minister was twofold:

Journalists like to see journalists as heroes. That’s excluding their peers in state-owned media in Africa who are more usually propagandists rather than journalists.
On the other side of the fence, governments typically like to see journalists as villains, while civil society – sitting on the fence – sees them as flawed heroes, tainted by commercial considerations.
Audiences are more sanguine. They see some journalists as angels, some as devils.