Former Cape Argus editor Gasant Abarder and Pretoria News editor Val Boje during the launch of his debut book, Hack with a Grenade: An editor's back stories of SA news, at the SuperSport Park. Picture: Thobile Mathonsi/African News Agency(ANA)
Pretoria - The role of local journalists and editors is to be the voice of reason and keep the grenade intact to make sense of the world.
This is highlighted in a new book written by former Independent Media stalwart Gasant Abarder, which also sheds light and lessons learnt about storytelling.
The former Cape Argus editor brought the launch of his debut book titled, Hack with a Grenade: An editor's back stories of SA news, to Centurion’s SuperSport Park yesterday.
He told Pretoria News editor Val Boje the book was a constant reminder that while finding solutions to the problems right here, South Africans kept looking elsewhere.
“We don't give ourselves enough credit as South Africans for finding the answers to solutions, and this is just a timely reminder that there is greatness in our midst and ordinary people do extraordinary things,” he said.
Abarder spoke about the second chapter in his book titled “Danny and the invisible people” and how he had brought a man named Danny, who was homeless, gay and HIV-positive, into the newsroom.
He said he did that because the newsroom needed to strip away its prejudices, and said what they learnt from Danny was so much more than what he learnt from them.
He said it was a real privilege to tell these stories and he wanted to address the blind spots in journalism that were never really interrogated as the country made the transition to democracy.
“We really never interrogated that rainbow nation and we see some of the symptoms of the failure to talk to each other, and we don't give ourselves enough credit as South Africans for finding the answers to challenges.”
The book explores backstories of several other issues that had a huge impact on communities and how that shifted news reporting – in 10 chapters from Zephany Nurse to the Fees Must Fall stories.
He said what was important about social media was that it democratised news where citizen journalism was introduced, however, a lot of fake news came with that, which was dangerous.
He advised journalists giving their opinion on social media to fact check their views and ensure that they were grounded by facts.
Abarder also shared a bit about his recovery (from) twitter addiction in his next book, which he said might surprise a lot of people.
Pretoria News