Welcome

This portfolio will contain an array of work I complete this year as well as previous highlights. Follow my blog to gain access to a world of Radio innovation which will see me creating amongst other productions, an audio documentary as well as fictional audio including a children's audio book. I will also work in a close community partnership with the Grahamstown Hospice and Radio Grahamstown in order to achieve social change. My final project for the year will be an elective module soon to be announced.

3rd Person Profile

The brief instructed us to produce a profile which featured ourselves in terms of our positions as radio journalists. We needed to conceptualise ourselves in terms of our current ideas surround the potential of sound as a medium.

 

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Personal Philosophy

The community I will be operating in as a journalist is based predominately in the local Grahamstown region. The audience within this area range across gender, race and age and include people with disabilities as well as those who are uneducated and illiterate. The community I will serve is one which has a tainted past filled with hardship and a segregated identity as a result of a war which occurred over a century ago. This separation is visible by the simple town structure Grahamstown follows: those who reside in the informal settlement outside of the town are generally less privileged while those with the most money have homes closer to the centre of town. With regard to the disadvantaged community, namely the blind, this specific audience knows no boundaries and includes men, women and children as well as males and females while race is not an important facet in the lives of this blind community. The majority of my audience is isiXhosa while English and Afrikaans do feature.

As a radio journalist working in Grahamstown I will definitely need to follow some sort of objectivity code to avoid further conflict in the community. I feel that every person needs to be held accountable for their words and as a journalist, I will definitely not be exempt from this accountability. Grahamstown is segregated and many of the pieces I produce may offend someone within the community whether intentionally or not and I feel that while I may not create the news, I will produce the stories and therefore I have control over the angle as well as the tone, both of which are able to change the meaning to either support or rebel against the topic at hand. Because of the blind community audience I will also need to ensure that the language I use is not derogatory at all and that the pieces I send out are understandable. My work needs to be fair so that this community can be brought together and I feel that any circumstances, both positive and negative, brought about by the pieces I produce will solely be my responsibility.

This is a diverse town and therefore I would need to produce stories which cater for the diverse audience that resides here. Political stories would need to be handled with care as they can easily become inflamed within a community which is always fighting about name changes etc. Community stories would need to be given more prominence so as to encourage individuals to get involved and to bring hope to those in need. Sport is a large community builder and by focusing on matches and events in a community-like tone, I would be able to instil pride amongst the Grahamstown inhabitants. News stories need to be concise and non-bias as this small community talks and if any information is missing from a current affairs story, it will soon be blown out of context.