eNCA, SABC News Broadcast Vans Damaged During Protests at Union Buildings

As Fees Must Fall protests at the Union Building became violent today, Outside Broadcast Vans of both eNCA and SABC News were damaged and reporters caught between police and protesters.

The eNCA camera used by Iman Rappetti was also damaged, with its lens being cracked as it continued to provide live pictures to viewers. Throughout the day, Iman and her cameraman have consistently had close calls when rocks were thrown by protestors, with the cameraman being hit.

One SAC news team on the scene felt the situation for them had become too dangerous as threats had been made directly to them, choosing to move away from the Union Buildings and reports from a safe distance.Reporters , like Chriselda Lewis, have found themselves running for cover from not only rocks from students, but teargas as well.

Though no ANN7 team had been threatened physically, the channel drew criticism on social media when they became the only news organisation to link today's violence to the EFF, with Tweeters saying that this is a result of the ANN7-Gupta connection.
 

Mid Term Budget Coverage Amid Student Protests

The SABC News Channel,  which has dedicated much less airtime to the student protests compared to the other news channels, covered the middterm budget from parliament as if there was no other big news happening in the country at the same time. Business anchor, Francis Herd, anchored coverage from the SABC's studio at parliament. Having a business news anchor and not a general news anchor at parliament also indicates the channel had no intention of shifting away from budget coverage to protest coverage. However, Francis did briefly mention the protests.  The SABC's budget buildup and coverage was simulcast on SABC3 from the 1pm hour, then SABC2 for the next 2 hours.

When it became clear that the happenings outside parliament would be affecting what goes on inside, the SABC decided to add a bit more focus to what was going on outside.

ANN7 showed scenes of student protesters outside parliament

On ANN7, it was as if the Midterm Budget speech was just another location of protests, i.e. only covering parliament from perspective of protesting students and not Minister Nene's speech. They continued with wall to wall coverage of the protests throughout the day. Kevin Brandt was situated outside parliament. The channel went live to parliament at 2pm, with no actual buildup to the speech. They added a video box with scenes outside parliament at about 2:20pm.

eNCA tried to find a common ground, covering the budget speech as normal as possible, with Andrew Barnes at parliament as usual, but not in the usual glass studio they have. He was instead among the protestors getting an on the ground feeling among the protestors. Throughout coverage of the proceedings, eNCA had a video box on screen showing live pictures from outside parliament.

CNBC Africa's prebudget panel

CNBC Africa covered the budget speech live, hosting both a preview and review panel on each side of the speech.

Like last year, Business Day TV did not provide any live coverage of the Mid Term Budget Speech.

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At 2:43pm, Minister of Finance, Nhlanhla Nene, finally [tried to] started speaking on the budget, but this was followed by a "fees must fall" chant.

2:47pm: The EFF's Ministers in Parliament were escorted out of the National Assembly

2:47pm Students have broken through the entrance of parliament. eNCA's Lester Kiewit is only reporter live on the scene covering this

2:49 Minister Nene continues speech. eNCA shows Minister in small block while allowing the scenes  outside parliament to play out with full audio.

SABC News split screen of Minister Nene and student protestors

2:53 Stun grenades go off outside parliament as Minister continues to speak
SABC News goes split screen with Minister in parliament. ANN7 completely removes small video box from happenings outside parliament


3:07pm Not one local news channel (except CNBC Africa) is providing major coverage of the midterm budget speech anymore

2:55 ANN7 Cut away from budget speech completely, covering protests outside instead. Kevin Brandt is calling in

3:02pm Andrew barnes notes he has never seen this big of a crowd attracted to a midterm budget speech.

3:10pm Gates of parliament are closed with students now locked out

Business anchor, Francis Herd, has been taken off the air of the SABC News Channel with their coverage being shifted to their studio in Johannesburg, anchored by Anita
Nomawethu Solwandle is reporting live via phone on SABC News Channel

3:31pm eNCA becomes first major news channel to return to proceedings in parliament
3:34pm Minister Nene finishes his speech, which was barely seen by viewers other than those wathcing on CNBC Africa. MP's are advised to go to their offices after parliament session ends until they advised to 'leave safely'

3:35pm MMusi Maimane requests the President and Minister Nzimande go address the people outside

3:36pm House adjurns fo the day (I have no idea what was said in the budget speech)

After budget speech, SABC News Channel tries to do classical post budget tradition of getting reaction from Ministers in Parliament, and CNBC Africa is analysing the budget.
eNCA and ANN7 focusing solely on the riots.

2015 South African of the Year Awards Winners

The South African of the Year Awards took place this past Saturday, October 17th and were broadcast live on ANN7. Below are the winners in each of the categories:

Young Person of the Year
Kgomotso Pooe

Campaign of the Year
Nedbank Ke Yona

Business Leader of the Year
Jabu Mabuza

Conservationist of the Year
 Fundisile Mketeni (CEO SA National Parks)

Sportsperson of the Year
AB de Villiers

Lifetime Achievement Award
Hugh Masakela (Whose name was spelt wrong on the cheque)

Trendsetting Celebrity of the Year

Cassper Nyovest
[Other nominees included AKA, Jonathan Boynton-Lee, Nandi Mngoma,  Nomzamo Mbatha, Terry Pheto, The Soil]

Spirit of Humanity Award


Sibusiso Leope Education Foundation (DJ Sbu)
[Other Nominees included Creseldah Ndlovu, Jordan Van Der Walt, Lead SA, Siyanda Ntenga (Ntenga Foundation), Dr Thandeka Mazibuko (Cancer awareness in Africa) and Vodacom e-school initiative]


South African of the Year

Dr Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma
[Other Nominees included Bonang Matheba, Brian Molefe,  Ephraim Shakes Mashaba, Imtiaz Sooliman, Rolene Strauss and  Professor Salim Abdool Karim]

ANN7 South African of the Year 2015 Red Carpet Pictures

The red, or rather blue carpet special was hosted by a wide array of ANN7 personalities, from Vuka Africa anchor Abigail Visagie, to entertainment presenters Liezle Wilson and Avashnee Vandiar, to sports editor, Edwin Kgaswe and anchor Lauren Jenae. In addition to this, Cindi Nel also presented a few segments, which was not announced ahead of time.

Shaun Bartlett and his wife

Simphiwer Mngomzulu presented backstage segments throughout the day

Abigail Visagie speaking to Miss World, Rolene Strauss

SATY2015 judge Claudia Henkel speaking to Avashnee Vandiar

The controversian SABC COO, Hlaudi Motsoeneng, not only attended an awards show hosted by a rival tv channel, but actually presented an award.

Avashnee Vandiar speaking to MTV Base presenter turned rapper along with her designer

Candy Harris speaking to Bucie

Cindy Nel, who ended up cohosting the show, chatting to Maps Maponyane, who was basically the face of the 2015 SATYs

Mango Groove opened the show

Overall, the red carpet wasn't too bad, it just seemed to not flow properly

SATY2015: The Official Programme

Below, find the official programme for the 2015 South African of the Year Awards:

Eleni Giokos Joins CNN

Back in July I said that Eleni Giokos was the biggest free agent in South African journalism following her departure from Bloomberg when it shut its Bloomberg Africa division.

Now, just a few hours ago, it was announced that Eleni Giokos will be joining CNN as a South African-based business correspondent, focussing on African financial issues. She will be working out of the Johannesburg Bureau. She will also obviously be contributing to shows like African Voices and Marketplace Africa.

Early in her career, Giokos was a reporter-anchor at CNBC Africa before joining the then eNews Channel in a role that was yet to be decided. Initially she did fill in anchoring, mainly as the prime time business anchor and reporting on financial issues before settling on the mid morning slot. Whilst at the then eNews Channel, Giokos covered stories like the World Economic Forum from Davos.

She left the renamed eNCA in October 2013 after being offered a senior position at the newly launched Bloomberg TV Africa, but was left out in the cold when earlier this year Bloomberg shut its African division as part of budget cuts. Since then she has done freelance work for South African news outlets like eNCA and 5FM before finally signing with CNN today.

Eleni is the third major eNCA almni to join CNN in the past year or so, joining the likes of Derek van Dam and Robyn Kriel who joined CNN from the South African news channel.

She joins CNN's ever expanding financial news division, which includes the highly successful cnnmoney.com brand. In addition, she joins an ever expanding African presence by CNN which includes Robyn Kriel in East Africa, David McKenzie in South Africa and Soni Methu throughout the rest of the pan African region.

To announce her signing with CNN, Giokos tweeted, "Beyond excited to announce that I've just joined @cnni," followed by retweets of congratulations throughout the day.

Mike McCarthy, Senior Vice President, Programming, at CNN International, said: “Eleni is an enormously talented and versatile broadcaster.  She has interviewed world leaders, covered major breaking news stories, and presented network feature programmes.  Her appointment underlines our commitment to African stories and African audiences.  We’re delighted to have her here at CNN.”

Her first day on air was actually today at 17:15 with an interview with Vodacom CEO Shameel Joosub on Marketplace Africa.

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On May 13th, 2013 Giokos hosted Richard Quest from CNN on her then usual slot on eNCA when Quest was in South Africa. Check out the videos below:







That evening, Giokos also appeared live on Quest Means Business, which was anchored live from CNN's Johannesburg bureau, which will be Giokos' new workplace.

Mahreen Chenia, Sport@10 win big at Gauteng Sports Awards

The Gauteng Sports Awards took place this past Sunday, October 11th, with some sports broadcasters winning big.

Like I predicted, Thomas Mlambo's Sports@10 won the Sports Programme of the Year category, beating out Thursday Night Live with Marawa (Supersport), The Sports Network with Andrew Hope (University of Johannesburg) and GameOn! (ANN7). Sport@10 was created a few years ago as Mlambo's own project, airing initially on a Thursday night before seeing the format refined to its now award winnng state and moved to Wednesday.

Mahreen Chenia of ANN7 took home the award of Sports Journalist of the Year, beating Mlambo and Thabiso Mosia (Power FM). Over the last day she has taken to to Twitter to thank all those that supported her. Despite hosting the least watched/listened to sprts show in the category, 'GameOn!' and Chenia have consistently been called one of the best sports shows around, which has now been confirmed by the award.

With so many ANN7 talents leaving the channel as soon as something better comes along, how long do you think it will be before Mahreen Chenia is snapped up by one of the bigger broadcasters?

Gladys Sithole Leaves ANN7, Becomes Hot 91.9fm's Head of News

Gladys Sithole has this past week announced that she was leaving ANN7.

Announcing her departure, Sithole tweeted, "What is the meaning of life if one doesn't explore the part of it that brings about challenges, experience and great responsibility? With that said, it is with great sadness that I inform all my friends and fans that this is my last week at @ANN7tv #ANN7 💞 Life has presented me with an opportunity which I at 1st didn't think I was worthy of, but have since gotten used to the idea #God"

Sithole had been with ANN7 since inception, when she was one of the many now infamous models who were given the opportunity to tryout for a permanent position at the channel. Prior to joining ANN7, Gladys was seen on television as one of the 'vixens' Vuzu's now long cancelled show titled Vixens.

She was one of very few of the models that tried out with ANN7 that actually got appointed. Others include now former ANN7 Prime anchor, Nzinga Qunta, and current Vuka Africa anchor, Abigail Visagie.

Gladys has anchored different slots for the channel, including stints as Weekend Prime anchor (a position everyone seems to hold prior to going on to greater things), before moving to weekday afternoons and then to anchoring the continental bulletin, Africa Tonight, where she truly shone (shined? Shown?). As anchor of Africa Tonight, Sithole also acted as the channel's main reporter for the AU Summit held in Johannesburg earlier this year, excellently covering the drama surrounding Sudanese President, Omar al-Bashir.

She was also always the the channel's main fill in anchor for ANN7 Prime, though for some reason whenever the main anchor of the bulletin left, Sithole was never promoted to that position.

Sithole joined Hot 91.9fm since the Johannesburg-based community radio station started in November last year. There, under the leadership of the excellent Marc Chase, she read the midday news report and earlier this year won big at the 2015 MTN Radio Awards.

Now she is being promoted to the radio station's head of news. Yip. From model to head of news. Hard work certainly pays off. This is why I no longer just dismiss it when ANN7 decides to bring in another model. They might be another Gladys Sithole.

Gladys held a farewell dinner for herself on Friday night (as everyone does when they leave ANN7), which was attended by the likes of senior reporter, Kalden Ongmu, 'GameOn!' presenter, Mahreen Chenia, and current ANN7 Prime anchor, Sebenzile Nkambule.


Gladys Sithole's last day with ANN7 was Thursday October 8th.

CCMA Orders ANN7 Reinstate Asanda Magaqa, Awards Damages

The CCMA has ruled that ANN7's dismissal of Asanda Magaqa late last year was unfair andhas awared damages.

Asanda left ANN7 late last year when she was unfairly dismissed for allegedly assaulting a colleague, making death threats and insubordination. Hajra Omarjee represented Asanda during the internal disciplinary process and after the outcome of this process was revealed, Omarjee too decided to resign in what eventually became an exodus of experienced journalists including prime time anchor Chantal Rutter Dros.

When Asanda left the channel, her excellent Sunday morning media show, Between the Lines was also 'suspended,' with the channel saying the format was not working and that it would return as soon as its format had been tweaked. We are still waiting for it to return.

The CCMA has ordered ANN7 to pay Asanda the sum of R500 000, the equivalent of ten months' salary. [It must be really awkward having your salary revealed in that way especially in journalism where salaries vary greatly].

Though the CCMA also ordered ANN7 to reinstate Asanda, whether she would go back is another thing. For monthd after her dismissal she continuously tweeted that she was done doing television altogether and when one Tweeter (I think that is what they are called) asked her when she would return, she replied by saying that she served her sentence on television already. [Either way, I would still absolutely LOVE to have an established and talented journalist like Asanda back on ANN7, a channel that now has very few experienced reporters].

On the victory, Asanda tweeted, "Thank you my friends... Your messages in my DM's & WhatsApp gave me strength... Your prayers kept me going :-)"

[Asanda please come back].

The SABC News Channel [Finally] Rolls Out Its New Schedule

The SABC News Channel has finally last week rolled out its new schedule structure, hinted at round about Easter this year then being postponed regularly.

With it comes, firstly and most controversially, the dropping of all the repeats of the local language bulletins that was seen on the channel late at night. This means that the SABC now too becomes another 24 hour news channel that broadcasts fully in Enlgish in a country with 11 official languages.

Also done away with are the one hour news bulletins like Newsroom with Eben Jansen. In its place are now bulletins that run for 3 hours on end:
Morning Live remains unchanged from 6am to 9am.

Newsroom is now a 3 hour brodcast from 9am, with Eben Jansen now no longer at the helm.

The 1pm business centric bulletin now gets absorbed into a 3 hour block called Midday Report, starting at 12pm.

At 3pm, News Today replaces what was previously PM News, though is basically the same format.

Question time remains unchanged at 5:30pm.

Though the tv guide says that Prime Time News is now 3 hours long from 6pm, Business Review with Francis Herd remains in the 6pm slot with Sports Live at 8:30pm.

Mahendra Raghunath returns to Your World, now live from 9pm to midnight, meaning that the SABC news channel has now gone from being the local news channel that went off air first at night to be being the channel that is still live the latest. More live news is never a bad thing.

This also means that the SABC News channel now trumps both ANN7 and eNCA in the shear amount of live news seen on the channel.

The channel has also reworked basically all of their weeked magazine shows, adding new ones, cutting others and now also showing repeats of Special Assignment nearly a week after it airs on SABC3.

Gauteng Sports Awards Nominees in Sports Programme of the Year Category

Earlier this week the Gauteng Sports Awards announced the nominees for their 2015 edition. The nominees for the Sports Programme of the Year Award are:

Sport@10
The weekly laid back sports programme is hosted by Thomas Mlambo and airs on SABC 1, which means it is most likely to win this category due to the sheer number of viewers it has relative to the other nominees. The show itself is not bad, featuring news, long form interviews and discussions.

GameOn!
The daily 30 minute sports programme is hosted by Mahreen Chenia and airs on ANN7. Reviews for the show are largely positive and regularly features interviews with big name sportsmen and women. In addition to general sports news, it has a strong focus on the overall state of South African sport than the other nominees. To watch the first episode of GameOn! click here. Trust me, its worth it

The Sports Network with Andrew Hope
University of Johannesburg. To everyone that gets paid a large sum of money to put together a sports programme, you got beat by a college kid. Let that sink in.

Thursday Night Live with Marawa
Robert Marawa hosts this weekly show on a Thursday Night (as the name says) on Supersport 4. Has a large focus on soccer and features a local singer each week as well. Airing on a Thursday means it has a stronger focus on building up to the weekend that lies ahead than reviewing past matches.

Notable exclusions include:
- Monday Night Football (Supersport 3)
- Soccerzone (SABC1)
- Backpages (Supersport 4)
- Sports Live (SABC News)
- eShibobo (eTV, eNCA)

For voting details and a list of the other nominees, click, here.