By Maeder Osler
Whenever I think about our mission at Toverview, I’m strongly reminded of the time, in the early 1970s, when I was lucky to be an apprentice journo at The Argus (it’s slogan was ‘Today’s News Today’).
Among other things, I was dropped off at the famous Clock Tower in the Old Harbour (at the entrance to the Alfred Basin) to gather information about shipping movements. This Victorian structure was the old Port Captain’s Office, built in 1892. Gentrification in the form of the Waterfront development still lay in the distant future, and these were still working docks only.
The Clock Tower in 1883 – just a year after being built. The clock was imported from Edinburgh.
This was the time of two-finger typing on manual typewriters in noisy newsrooms, scribbling in spiral notebooks, and news editors who would yell: ‘Osler, for chrissake, keep it short. And check your names and spellings.’
The big challenge – given the often foreign sounding names of ships, their places of registration, their ports of origin and their destinations — was to be accurate. In other words, an exercise in the good old WHAT: the first of the famous five Ws of journalism:
What, Where, When, how, Hnd lastly (reserved for the august op-ed pages), Why?
Despite privileged schooling, a BA degree, a Diploma in Education, and various other things besides, I often got it wrong. And while I was still struggling with the WHATs, the other Ws wormed and wriggled around and, more often than not, simply made off and disappeared.
All of this may seem quaint, antiquated and ultimately irrelevant. But whenever I think of our continuing challenges in the shape-shifting world of the digital and social media, the Clock Tower looms ever larger in my thinking. And I hear a voice in my ear: ‘Get those names and facts right, Osler, and make it snappy!’
Just one example: Noupoort, once a tavern of the railways, and then a forgotten one for many years, is suddenly at the centre of lots of flying talk about energy investments involving scores of wind turbines to be erected in the mountains above the town. So what’s true news, and what’s false? It seems to me this is a prime case for applying the Clocktower Principle. So see you at Noupoort, very soon … In the meantime, help from folk on the ground would be welcome …
FEATURED IMAGE: The restored Clock Tower at the entrance to the Alfred Basin, still a prominent feature of the gentrified V&A Waterfront. According to the Cape Town Heritage website, whence these images have also come from, the red walls are the same colour as they were in the 1800s, ‘having been carefully matched to scrapings of the original paint’.