Sniper scandal and SA’s arms trade – a story of print and web working together
We were working this week on a story about South Africa's sales of sniper rifles to Libya (and here in Rapport), a story based on video evidence posted on the Web and which finally exposed the reason for the South African government's continued reluctance to confirm on the specifics of its arms dealings with Libya as it lurched towards a civil war.
This story is noteworthy, I think, besides being pretty interesting, it also involved us working across platforms both to produce material for the report but also using web tools to assist with print presentation and story-telling.
Media24 Investigations reporter, Julian Rademeyer, used the web to both source evidence for his sniper's rifle story but also to produce a video (see below) which was used to back our report up, both giving us print stills and web video.
The web video was linked with interactive "tags" in print in both City Press and Rapport, allowing print readers to connect to the video via cellphone by taking pictures of the tag using their phones.
The giants of world newspapers in a groovy graphic
My spouse and muse, Gill Moodie, has this great piece on the world's largest newspapers over on her Grubstreet blog. And because she's my wife, I nicked it for myself too. Sorry! This graphic puts the 30000 daily newspaper I edit into some perspective!
"Who said newspaper's are dead? Look at this data visualisation of the world's top 100 newspapers which I knocked together and which tells another story. According to this newspapers are cooking like never before - in certain parts of the globe at least.