"We do this job to get the story out and if that means dodging rocks being pelted at you, then so be it,” Rhodes journalism graduate Demelza Bush told Grocott’s Mail after her video Marching for Malema took top honours in the Online Multimedia section at the 2012 Standard Bank Sikuvile Journalism Awards held in Johannesburg last Tuesday night.
"We do this job to get the story out and if that means dodging rocks being pelted at you, then so be it,” Rhodes journalism graduate Demelza Bush told Grocott’s Mail after her video Marching for Malema took top honours in the Online Multimedia section at the 2012 Standard Bank Sikuvile Journalism Awards held in Johannesburg last Tuesday night.
Bush worked with her Mail & Guardian Online colleague Nickolaus Bauer to produce the video, which depicts the violence that journalists and police had to contend with during a protest on the first day of the disciplinary hearing of former ANCYL leader Julius Malema.
“Sometimes this job is emotionally taxing and dangerous… especially when the crowd is so hostile and threatening towards the media,” she told Grocott’s Mail, where she interned as a student in 2009. She also played a role in the Grocott’s Then and Now exhibition at the Albany Museum in the same year.
Also recognised at the awards were Professor Guy Berger, the former head of journalism at Rhodes, together with Mia Malan, project manager at the Discovery Health Journalism Centre based at Rhodes and Mail & Guardian health columnist.
Berger was honoured (in absentia) with the revered Allan Kirkland Soga Lifetime Achievement Award for his “immeasurable contribution to the craft of journalism in this country and internationally”. He left the School of Journalism and Media Studies a year ago to take up a position at Unesco in Paris.
“Professor Berger has helped grow journalism in this country through his work as a reporter, an editor, a journalism teacher, an academic, a respected columnist and analyst and as a relentless media freedom activist,” the judges said.
Malan won an award in the comment and analysis section for her piece about the abduction (ukuthwala) of young women for marriage and child-bearing.
Categories at the prestigious awards included Story of the Year, Journalist of the Year, Enterprise News, Creative Journalism, Editorial Cartoons, Online Multimedia, Photography and others.
Bush offered a succinct word of advice for current journalism students: “My advice… is to get as much experience [as possible]… It does pay off in the end.”
In July Bush and fellow Rhodes alumna Verashni Pillay won a CNN Multichoice African Journalism Award in the online category for their video about leasing scams.
