ALPHA Media launches Southern Eye newspaper today as a platform to capture the dialogue in southern Zimbabwe and raise it to a national and global level.
By Vincent Kahiya
Yesterday our newsroom led by Kholwani Nyathi was buzzing with life as the spritely young men and women went through the final motion of putting together this new media project for people of the south.
This Southern Eye newsroom will be a collaborative place for both the paper’s staff and members of the local community. The partnership with our publics is built around the fervent desire to have an honest coverage of the issues from a local perspective.
Our Digital First strategy as AMH, was amply demonstrated in this project which we launched online first last week. At the time of writing, the paper had already attracted a good following on Facebook and Twitter.
We are encouraged by this response from our readers as we strive to implement an open newsroom policy both in the physical space at our new offices and in the virtual space. We commit to provide people of the south with broader platform to talk.
This pledge is driven by our desire to connect local communities and activities to what is happening in the rest of the country and beyond our borders.
We have a duty to foster civil discourse, the desire to learn more and for communities to become more involved in issues that influence their day-to-day activities.
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In a region which has for a long time felt marginalised to the extent of feeling hopeless, Southern Eye will strive to identify persons and institutions who are vessels of hope and new ideas which will make a real difference in the community.
We are guided by the firm belief that economic progress and social development in southern Zimbabwe will come from the great minds resident in Masvingo, Matabeleland and Midlands provinces.
The country has heard of the litany of challenges in this part of the State and we are here to stimulate solutions and to provide a forum for people to speak with no inhibition about their future.
Local news is an important aspect of our individual needs. Local issues such as weather, crop situations, school holidays, traffic accidents and crime — let local residents know what is happening. This not only helps to keep communities informed, but to also keep them safe.
Our news and features pages are open to capture debate and to celebrate local champions critical for local progress in all aspects of life — be it sport, arts, community service, leadership or business prowess.
Politics will be an integral facet of our local news coverage as we head towards a critical electoral process.
We have a role in letting local candidates — whether incumbents or new — to get their issues to the voting public.
Voters’ choices should be informed by detailed and correct information about candidates and political institutions which they represent. It is important in this election year.
Southern Eye will strive to tell the whole story and not just the end result. Sometimes politicians in their manifestos only announce the end result and not the details of why and how.
This makes it difficult to decide who is telling the truth and who is presenting a different picture to further their own agenda. Our local news coverage in this area will seek to pitch political rhetoric by politicians against local realities.
Local news with the proper supporting context is the future. We are moving more towards the variety-like presentation where the reader gets all the different angles and twists of the story.
We therefore through the Southern Eye, endeavour to give the citizenry an opportunity to tell their stories. These are the people who experience the news — those who have the real accounts. We need real people to share their views about what they experience locally.
This should help us chart the way where the news transforms into localised, national, regional and global perspective, yet showing the connection between these different levels and guiding the reader to what the news really is.
We are here to help a person to join the community and to help the community to understand needs of people that compose it. It all goes together.
Vincent Kahiya is AMH editor-in-chief
