eNCA Hosts Guest Youth Anchors For Youth Day

Jeremy Maggs and his Youth Day co anchor anchoring News Night

All the South African news channels provided special coverage for this past week's Youth Day commemorations.

SABC News Channel simulcasted SABC1's special Youth Day broadcast (which was produced by SABC News) and anchored by SABC News' younger reporters, who did a good job at covering all the events happening concurrently which included interviews with other young people and in studio debates. It also included special reports on relevent topics by reporters like the excellent Chriselda Lewis.

ANN7's cameras were everywhere where major Youth Day commemorations were being held in addition to small information pieces that aired throughout the day. ANN7 boasts the youngest overall anchor lineup of all the local channels: youngest anchor (Chante Jantjies, Weekend Vuka Africa anchor), youngest breakfast show anchor (Abigail Visagie, Vuka Africa) and youngest prime time anchor (Nzinga Qunta, ANN7 Prime).

But my personal favourite has to be eNCA. In addition to the usual live coverage and in studio debates that the others had, eNCA decided to do something less gloomy than to mention things like high youth unemployment, they had school children as co anchors throughout the channel's programming.

Though the school children seemed a bit nervous (though they were quite far from being as bad as those people ANN7 unleashed on us when they launched), it was an experience they would never forget. They got to read and introduce stories, have a bit of banter with the 'senior' anchor, got to interview guests and themselves also got answer relevant questions.

Njabulo Moyo, Duduzile Ramile's co anchor for Youth Day, presented the idea that eNCA have youth anchors co anchor their Youth Day coverage, an idea thatthe channel took up.