People came in large numbers to learn about maths in the newsroom, how to interview CEOs (with the ever popular Bruce Whitfield) or to listen to Luuk Sengers on how to run an investigation.

Read more about some of the events and speakers of the 2010 Power Reporting conference on our blog.

Download the Conference Programme here.

Read about computer classes here.

Participant feedback:

“I really enjoyed it, specially the interactive sessions.”

“A great conference and opportunity to network.”

“Keep this going!”

“This is definitely the best course I have ever been on and hope to return regularly in the future.”

“I really enjoyed being able to flip between the investigative and narrative streams.”

“This is really a very good opportunity for investigative reporters to exchange experiences and views.”

“Seeing how West African journalists approach issues was very interesting”

“I really enjoyed the diversity of views.”

Power Reporting: the African Investigative Journalism Conference is run by Wits Journalism in partnership with the Forum of African Investigative Reporters (FAIR) and supported by the Valley Trust and the Open Society Institute. In 2010 the partnership was joined by frayintermedia.

“A teenage girl was dispatched to run up the street to call the police. Others followed, each carrying the same message:

‘They’re killing the Shangaans.’”

Beauregard Tromp’s re-telling of the outbreak of xenophobic violence in the Ramaphosa township held a classroom full of seasoned journalists spellbound, mortified.

The outbreaks that swept across Gauteng and the Western Cape “defined the period,” said Tromp. It was the year’s biggest story.

Photo Halden Krog

Tromp gave a name and a face to an image that would otherwise have become only a symbol.

His journey to Mozambique to follow the dead Nhamuave, to meet his family, to find out where he lived, to find out who he was—why he was human—was an effort to treat just another corpse “with the dignity he deserved.”

For his efforts he made an effective clean sweep of 2008’s journalism awards in South Africa, winning the Mondi Shanduka print journalist of the year, CNN South African print journalist of the year and the Vodacom South African print journalist of the year.

Nhamuave’s story, as told by Tromp, is chilling.

“The nearby wooden stall had already been stripped bare for the bonfire burning at the traffic circle.

“Some of the mob took flaming pieces of wood and put it underneath a battered and bloody tall ‘mugza,’ who was already down on his hands and knees. His screams did not reach the ears of the heavily armed police contingent some 100 metres away.

“Dissatisfied with their first attempt, the mob wrapped tall ‘mugza’ in his duvet cover and piled wood on top of him.

“The fire got going. A mattress was thrown on top of the flaming man. The fire engulfed tall ‘mugza’.

But what is Tromp’s tale? How does a journalist immerse himself in the savagery and heartbreak of Nhamuave’s story and retain the required professional detachment and objectivity while remaining, himself, human?

“That’s the kind of stuff we live for,” said Tromp talking about the outbreaks in Rhamaphosa.

Living for death? Carrion feeder, heartless newshound?

Said Tromp, there where six of South Africa’s best photographers taking shots of Nhamuave as he burnt to death. And Tromp, the lone writer on the scene, remained calm and removed. vultures surrounding a dying beast, waiting to be fed, after its brutal slaying in a callous, unforgiving and inhuman wild ?

“Where I’ve come from I’ve seen fairly horrible things,” said Tromp who grew up in Belhar in the Cape Flats.

“We live in a violent society where you see violence on a fairly regular basis,” he said, “what should be an exception becomes the norm.”

The morality of reporting on death is a dilemma, said Tromp, that “I am acutely aware of”. He claims that during the xenophobic attacks that inherent moral conflict was a topic of much discussion amongst those journalists involved.

But, he said, the benefit of brining that story back to his readers justifies the necessary removal of the self from the situation.

“We did the right thing”.

Personally, a degree of detachment is required, “when I leave the office, I leave the office at the office.”

“You learn to deal with it,” he said, “those that don’t, the self will crumble”.

But, for Tromp, the emotional gravity of the story would ultimately find its expression on the purely personal level.

About a year after the burning of Nhamuave, Tromp was in Durban for the CNN awards for journalism, Halden Krog, had just won African photographer of the year for his image of the Flaming Man.

Said Tromp, seeing Krog’s image on screen acted as a catalyst for the release of an emotion that had been buried for almost a year.

“As I walked up to the stage I was really in tears,” he said.
Tromp had received his African Journlalist of the year award just after Krog.

“It was the only time I allowed it to get through,” said Tromp, and for him the experience was sufficient to cleanse the waters of his subconscious from a subtle trauma buried deep out of professional necessity.

“I sleep better at night,” he said.

“Appalling, Monstrous, absolutely preposterous. I’ll have to have a word with your proprietor,” says Philip Beresford.

He is quoting the response of a Duke to questions around his wealth in 1982. Despite the abrasive response, Beresford’s forays into “hunting the rich” , were destined to get easier. With the help of Rupert Murdoch, he managed to publish his first “rich list”- a thousand names and entries.

Speaking in the auditorium at the WITS Power Reporting conference this morning, on the same day the United States goes to the polls for the mid-term elections, the British journalist highlighted the social and economic reasoning behind so-called “rich lists”. Much of the world’s wealthy are also the most powerful and that money has a lobbying power like little else.

The Sunday Times list is now eagerly awaited and has spread to many more countries like the Netherlands and China. The Sunday Times publishes a South African rich list.

Beresford says he does everything in his power to minimize the chance of losing his job and Murdoch losing any of his 6,2 million pounds.

While those targeted as names on the list have called the practice “crass” and “vulgar”, Beresford is unapologetic, citing five reasons why he believes the list is an important societal tool.

The rich are also the most powerful- by showing who they are and how they did it will can mitigate their influence on policies.

The rich of any society are part of a debate on how spending should be cut and how austerity measures, in Britain, for instance, contrast to the few who are incredibly wealthy.

Flowing naturally, a ‘richlist’ can name and shame tax havens that siphon off huge reserves of wealth to off-shore accounts.

By cataloguing the wealthy, it is possible to profoundly affect the attitudes of the rich to their own wealth. Enter Bill Gates. His huge donations to charities and the relentless outing of him as the ‘richest’ has increased his donations. The lists have become calling cards for many like Warren Buffet, seeing their wealth as something to be shared.

China rich list in 1999 created a change in attitudes in China and newly rich could feel they aren’t alone and started a move to a plural system of government.

Stalking the rich by rooting out spending, tax returns and house purchases is not without consequences: A Russian man was killed in a drive-by shooting and the 9-year-old daughter of another was kidnapped following the publication of their names on separate “rich lists”. There are also claims that the list stirs up ‘class hatred’. He also says that “About 80% detest what I do…and would love to use expensive lawyers.”

Beresford says the celebration of the rise of the entrepreneur occurs as they provide jobs and pay their taxes. When asked how the compiling team know how much people are worth, Beresford is adamant that he uses factual details and proven documents. Co-operation by the members, some accountants, tax returns all help to put together the list.

On a parting note, Beresford admits to being philosophical about the 1500 people who he can’t prove should be on the list and says, “I hope to go for another decade, Mr Murdoch permitting…”

Luuk Sengers speaks about the importance of story-based inquiry

Philip Beresford, Editor UK's Rich list by Scott Simpson

Philip Beresford started working on the Rich list in 1989 for the London Sunday Times the list is made up of different sectors of Britain’s high society from mega-rich business people to celebrities whose ‘ bling’  culture often distracts reader from the truly ostentatiously wealthy. The question around why the average man on the street should care about how much money others hand was well answered. The fact is the really rich often have companies that create jobs for many people and their activities peak the interest of the rich, middle class and working class. Once again the topic of the rich in Africa and disclosure was not easy to address because many countries have privacy laws that do not allow for journalists to investigate how the wealth is acquired. It is perhaps necessary for more Forbes lists to appear in African countries to demystify the subject of money and how to acquire it legally because of the high poverty levels.  And to uncover corruption in terms of how state funds may be misused to make a few very wealthy , leaving the poor to fight over scraps.

How do you overcome the constraints of a 65% illiteracy rate in Liberia and a large indigenous population that still can’t read or write?

How do you force notorious mine owners in Zambia who shoot at their workers and subject them to sub-human conditions to grant an interview in one afternoon?

How do you go from reporting on surburban crime to opening a nationwide can of worms and working with the Malawaian police in seven days?

Answer: it’s all in the medium.

Investigative journalists Terza Chirwa, Eric Mwaba, Ruth Kanyanga and Eva Flomo’s sessions ended in an animated discussion on the advantages, downsides and huge potential of TV, radio and the internet in Africa.

Kanyanga works with the Zambian National Broadcastng Corporation and that country’s dependence on mining ensured that the shooting of 13 casual workers by their Chinese bosses a month ago made headlines. Kanyanga went behind the scenes, and ended up capturing footage of the deplorable conditions the miners were forced to work in. She says; “without realising it, my camera became a weapon.”

Her next stop was the owner of the mine, who she told bluntly; “As I am speaking to you, the cameras are rolling. This is what I have seen. Whether you give me a reaction or not, the camera will pick it up. If you walk away from me, it will be filmed as well.”

The mine owner promptly responded to the allegations and the story is still unravelling in Zambia.

Tereza Chirwa thought her radio station had got the scoop when it uncovered people manufacturing fake fertilizer in a community in central Malawi. That was until listeners called from various parts of the country and turned the station’s searchlight on the same scam happening on a larger scale in the rural areas. “Within a week, we were working with the police,” Chirwa disclosed.

For UN Radio Liberia’s Eva Flomo, illiteracy rates are easily submerged with radio; “it has the advantage of capturing the news in indigenous language,” she says. Flomo’s story chronicled the pollution of water sources for three years  in a community and only took off when her organistaion showed an interest. “Once you bring the issue to the fore, somebody is forced to talk.”

Of course, when question time came, the discussion soon begged the question; shall we just change that old saying  that “the pen is mightier than the sword” to “the pen, mic and camera are mightier than the sword”?

All speakers agreed that the actuality of TV, radio and the Internet, as well as their immediacy, have a clear advantage over newspapers, but insisted that the ethics are the same, and that print was by no means dead in Africa.

Kanyanga said her inability to ensure the proven role of corrupt government officials in the mine scandal was aired (her station is government-owned) led her to hand the story to a friend who works with a newspaper.

What?? Handing a ready-made scoop to a competitor? What was she thinking?

She shrugged and replied; “so long as the news gets out there.”

There are somewhere approaching a hundred cheap, bright red plastic chairs squeezed behind small school-styled desks in a fairly stuffy room, each of them is being slowly warmed by the rear-end of some or another individual connected in some way to African journalism.  Judging by the number of circles beneath their eyes, the shoddy condition of their hair, their budget clothing, one assumes that these are mostly veterans in the art of storytelling.

And here they sit, rapt.

Their eyes uniformly glued to the spitfire-mouth which for the next 45 minutes will continue to pour over her admirers a ceaseless liquid prose. “Begin to think like a camera,” she is busy telling us, “and humanise your subject”.

Pippa Green

“News stories just don’t capture the depth available in narrative”.

Pippa Green is the head of Journalism at the University of Pretoria, she is very obviously used to commanding an audience. With a fluency and authority her talk, which served essentially to justify narrative journalism’s potential to offer a deeper truth and to create a space for truth telling beyond the agendas set by those in positions of power, held the attention of an audience in which one would  have been able to hear a pin-drop if that enigmatic fuel that drove her engaging rhetoric where to suddenly dry up.

As I scribbled the note: “it is bloody difficult to construct the skeleton for a narrative styled blog on a master of long-form narrative while still trying to absorb the intricacies of her knowledge,” respect for this inspiring speaker, who loomed very, very large above her 600 page monster narrative Choice, not fate, the life and times of Trevor Manuel which lay on the desk which separated her from her audience.

Those jewels of wisdom that were, in the end, captured on my barley legible notepad:

“Narrative journalism rests absolutely on the quality of reporting,” here we come to understand the necessity of solid, accurate and thorough research that underpins the success of any good piece of narrative journalism, “the quality of reporting shows when it captures a place in the mind and the conciousness of the reader”.

“There is a need for us to create our own narratives,” for short form news to readily panders to the agenda’s set by those with power and may be readily mislead and inflated by the mechanisms of PR.

And do as (whichever great author she had on the screen beside her does) and “use a pen like a camera, if you can do that,” despite the lack of long-form journalism in the country and the apparent trend towards bit-sized news, “people will read it”.

To conclude:

“Maybe there will be a day when Malema gives a press conference and nobody goes because they are too busy doing narrative journalism.”

Monday’s course at Computer Lab 113 from 5pm-6pm:

Online tools to track stories Power Reporting Wits 1 Nov 2010

Online tools to track stories and sources (Advanced)

If you are already comfortable with web, news and social media searching, the next step it to set up online tools that will give you one click access to the latest developments:

• · Introduction to RSS feeds
• 4 Google tools (personalised news/beat pages; alerts and feeds; news reader; online dashboard/ iGoogle)
• Managing feeds

Tuesday’s course in Lab 2A is from 5-6pm:

Searching for documents Power Reporting Wits 2 Nov 2010

Search techniques to find original source documents (Advanced)

An Introduction to effective searching and advanced search techniques (including time based searching):

• Types of sources (primary/secondary/multiple/official/mediated/reference/original) to reflect official/govt, academic and society views
• Domain and document type search strategies to find original/source documents