Newspapers and No-shows

The first workshop of term two commenced last Friday. The aim of this workshop was to start generating content. This however, did not happen. Only three Upstarters came, two of whom are no longer part of the project. It was regretfully decided a few weeks ago that Ncubecko and Aphiwe would have to be removed from the team because they had extra science lessons at school during the time we host the workshop on friday. The message clearly didn’t go through clearly enough. To their disappointment, this has now been rectified. In this session we allowed the three of them to start generating the more lighthearted content. Ncubecko found celebrity news, Aphiwe researched brain teasers and the only Upstart member- the other Aphiwe (Mame) discovered interesting facts. Whilst this was useful, the failure of the Upstart members not showing up was a communication error between us and Setumo that we can’t let happen again.

Saturday was far more fruitful, as this time everyone came except Aviwe and, ironically for the first hour, myself, due to my final documentary interview going on longer than expected. We don’t have her contact details, so although she should have been made aware that we were having a session, there’s no way of me or Refilwe contacting her personally. In this session, Refilwe gave the Upstarters a link that had past issues of the Upstart newspaper, and they each found stories and features that they were keen to rewrite for radio. They were still working on this by the time I’d arrived, and from there we helped them work their stories so that it was presentable for radio. Shortly after we went through the latest addition as a group, and each Upstarter found a story that they had published themselves to rewrite for radio. This was their task to be completed for the next workshop.

In overcoming the Easter weekend problem that I discussed last week, we decided as a group a couple of midweek workshops that would suit them. We decided that Monday and Wednesday would be the appropriate days, and thus we are hoping that time constraints won’t be an issue.