Local Community Journalism in South Africa: "The audience is there and the infrastructure is there.”
At Paul McNally’s first community radio station in South Africa — in Orange Farm, about 40 kilometers from Johannesburg — 350,000 people tuned in each week for bulletins about protests, service delivery issues, and the general happenings of their neighborhood. The hunger for information was so strong that, after the station aired its first legal advice show, people lined up around a schoolyard to ask their own questions. This and other examples of effective local community radio in South Africa are detailed in a new report from Nieman Lab at Harvard University.