Social media rules the roost when it comes to being first with the news. There is no point in fighting it, it is our 21st-century reality.
Even old-school newspapermen and women have come to accept this, albeit grudgingly in come cases.
Hence in our newsroom there is no longer much tension between reporters in the millennial and Gen Z brackets, whose instinct is to tweet first and report later, and their older editors, who were brought up in an era when breaking news had to fall in line with print and broadcasting deadlines.
Almost everything is instant now and news cycles move so fast that what was headline news — or trending, to use modern jargon — when we woke up this morning is just a distant memory tonight.
But still, social media plays an important role in imparting information and its ubiquity means it can spread the news far and wide in ways that traditional media platforms can only dream of matching.
Yet it can hardly replace the role of traditional media in providing society with mostly credible, well-researched and balanced news and information.
Whereas social media has “democratised” the information landscape in that anyone with a phone, access to data and a social media account can post anything, there are risks associated with this, not least of which is whether such posts should be believed.
With traditional media, the assumption is that before media workers and their managers put information out there, they would have investigated and done their best to verify the facts.
Hence readers generally trust traditional publications and are mostly willing to pay for their content.
In return readers expect journalists to go the extra mile in establishing the facts of a story, and not merely take information on social media or statements from official sources at face value.
In the well-publicised controversy surrounding 23-year-old Chidimma Adetshina’s abortive participation in the Miss South Africa pageant, for instance, journalism demands that we go far beyond what has been put out by the home affairs department, the beauty contest organisers and the former contestant herself.
One wonders if the whole row about her citizenship would not have been better handled and debated if we had had greater access to information much earlier
Much has been said, and continues to be said even in these pages today, about how the whole saga has resulted in Adetshina being cyber-bullied and how some citizens, including at least one cabinet minister, are being accused of xenophobia.
One wonders if the whole row about her citizenship would not have been better handled and debated if we had had greater access to information much earlier.
In the not-so-olden-days, newsrooms would have invested time and resourcing in finding Adetshina’s mother who, according to the statement put out by the home affairs department, seems to be at the centre of the imbroglio.
Who is she, where exactly is she from and what were the circumstances that led home affairs to believe that she may have committed fraud and stolen someone’s identity?
Does the fact that she readily co-operated with the home affairs investigation, according to the department, not suggest that she was confident nothing was untoward?
Hopefully our newsroom, and others, will soon answer these questions.
The war of words that has ensued, mostly on social media, between South Africans and Nigerians has highlighted another problem — citizens of the two nations know precious little about one another. This makes for fertile ground for prejudice, stereotypes and suspicions to thrive.
The latest saga is troubling because it adds to a long list of other controversies, some as serious as the alleged ill-treatment of SA companies with investment in Nigeria and the deportation of a group of Nigerian visitors to SA on the grounds that they didn't have yellow fever immunisation cards, that have caused tensions between the two nations over the past two decades.
Historically, the popular media in both countries has tended to be insular — when it did look beyond the border, the focus would be the US, the UK and sometimes Europe.
We may learn something of Nigerian culture live from the high-class Nollywood movies that are the staple of streaming services, and Nigerians might learn about us through a telenovela or two, but that’s where it ends.
Hence many people in the nation infamous for the 1983 “Ghana Must Go” mass deportation of illegal immigrants believes South Africans are irredeemable xenophobes while some South Africans seem to believe that the country’s endemic drug addiction problem would be miraculously resolved with the departure of Nigerians.
The truth, however, is that the vast majority of people on both sides are law-abiding citizens who are proud of their nations and dream of seeing their countries thrive and become major world economies.
That is why, at the political level in the early 2000s, Nigeria and South Africa found it easy to work together to transform a moribund Organisation of African Unity into an African Union that is equal to the challenges of the new century.
Africa’s growth and development are heavily dependent on South Africa and Nigeria — the two dominant economies on the continent — forging closer ties. However political and diplomatic ties will mean very little if mutual suspicion and prejudice reign at grass-roots level.
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