TWITTER AS A REPORTING TOOL

South Africa has, in the past couple of weeks, been hit by what can possibly called the biggest mass killing in the country ever since gaining democracy in 1994, the Marikana Lomnin mine mass killing.

Despite the presidency calling for the commission of enquiry, most journalists, and other citizens, used, and still are, social networks to view their opinions and report about the whole issue. Here I will be looking at how top journalists Barry Bateman and Poloko Tau from EWN and THE STAR newspaper respectively have used social network Twitter to report about what is now being called the Marikana Massacre and the events that followed the accident. The third account I used was the ENCA (formerly known as E-news).

First up I will look at Poloko Tau from THE STAR newspaper that for me he is by far the one in the frontline of reporting about the whole Marikana issue on twitter. What makes him good in this situation is that, according to one of his tweets, he had a contact amongst the strikers and he was reporting live, he reported what he saw. And that didn’t only make him the best but also objective because regardless of what was happening he had to say it as it was and that was the only thing he was tweeting about and still is. What Poloko was, and still is, doing was purely reporting and taking into consideration that he works for a printing company, letting people know about what was happening every other minute was a priority, and at that time the best way to get the news across was through social media and Poloko went for twitter and it worked in the end.

EWN reporter Barry Bateman is another journalist who kept us informed in regards to the Marikana tragedy and also other issues. Because the Marikana tragedy was not a one-day thing, Barry become very helpful as he went on to tweet to us with court proceedings happening in Ga-rankuwa, although he was never in Marikana himself, and that was very good for someone who had been following the story since it began. I say that because I, for one, heard the news about the charges against the strikers being dropped from Barry through twitter. Despite being objective at most times, one thing I love about the way Barry reports, not only on this matter but in many others too, is that he brings in an element of opinion from a journalist point of view rather than just sticking to the 5W’s of basic journalism.

Now there was ENCA, they, just like Barry Bateman, had a little disadvantage to Poloko because even if they had cameras at the scene, they use their account for different stories. With that said, ENCA also used pictures and videos and that gave the edge of not only telling the story but also showing the story. That is the only and also most important difference ENCA had over Poloko and Barry.