Pap n' Vleis

Lincoln van der Westhuizen

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To start this thing off I should perhaps give some background information about this here “new – fangled blog”. This blog is an attempt to throw different cultures in a great big melting pot, and then crucially, placing that pot within a journalistic context. We are going to make fun of the media simply because they are not always right. There will be observations about not only students but also university. I thought that a good place to start this post would be to answer the question: “why do I want to become a journalist?”

Firstly, a free press is one of the most important things in a democracy. The public needs to be aware of what happening around them. With all this in mind, the question has to be asked: Is it just me or are the only people that like journalists, other journalists? And why shouldn’t people dislike journalists, they’re nosy, prying, stubborn individuals who more often than not end up mentioning uninteresting jargon like slugs, byline, leads and inverted pyramids. They quote selectively and some of them are as biased as Australian sports commentators. Yet I want nothing more than to be one of these people.

I know that it is narcisstic, but I also want to be the one who knows everything first. I also want to break that big story that changes the way people see the world. I often wonder if what drives journalists is not the pursuit of the truth, but some vain obsession to be better than their rivals. Make no mistake, journalism has some challenges that have emerged in recent times and that have to be dealt with if the media industry is not going to collapse.

Trying to become a journalist in this day and age is an incredibly daunting task. All around us we have new technology and it appears as if anyone with a broadband connection can call themselves a journalist. In our information saturated climate is it still possible for good journalism to prosper and to be appreciated? Is it still worthwhile to study to become a journalist? I believe so; one only has to read a book like The Bang - Bang Club by Joao Silva and Greg Maranovich to see how journalists can still have an influence on the world we live in. This book explores the lives of the photographers who took the photos of the Hostel wars during the early nineties. Every aspiring journo should read it. The book just proves one very important fact: the public still needs brave individuals to push the envelope and to be there in the trenches to send back information.