About me

I'm a 47-year-old media practitioner with 23 years of experience on print, digital, film and recently TV news broadcasting platforms.

I have worked as a hard news and financial news copy editor, as well as sports copy/layout sub editor for various publications and recently for a TV channel over a 15-year period.
The rest of my work experience revolved around news and feature and opinion writing, and I have worked as a news editor and subtitles editor.
The highlight of my career was in 2006 when Peter Bruce, the now retired editor of Africa's renowned, foremost financial publication, Business Day, plucked me from relative obscurity and offered me the opportunity to play a more active role as part of his brainchild, the newly formed but now defunct The Weekender, as a collumnist.
My column was initially called "There's a Zulu" on my Stoep, a name which I frowned upon from the onset as I felt it sounded demeaning and condescending. The Afrikaans word stoep means veranda.

I instead opted for "100% Zuluboy". My toungue-in-cheek, provocative, Afrocentric social commentary pulled no punches and therefore invited a lot of praise and criticism, which is ideally how a column should be viewed - with admiration and disdain.

At one point Peter Bruce named me employee of the month.

Let me hasten to add that my strongest professional attribute is my versatility, a rare trait which has enabled me to dive into any task assigned to me by my superious without hesitation.
I thrive on beating challenges and learning new things, as evidenced by the variety of job functions and industries on display on my CV.
I demonstrated the abovementioned capability recently when, out of the blue, I announced that I now wanted to work for a TV news channel.
It took two weeks of on-the-job training, characterised by a few teething problems, naturally, to outgrow print.

Mind you, TV works differently: news is live and on-the-job training requires one to man a bulletin without any help from anyone. Imagine being expected to work on crawlers, breaking tickers or headlines on the rundown which the bulletin editor wants on air in the next 30 seconds.

As much as I enjoy the adrenalin rush and, strange enough, have come to look forward to the nerve-wracking experience, I have decided to resign with a view to pursuing greener pastures elsewhere in Africa, so I can be able to tell and interprete other stories.

Of late, however, it has come to my attention that South Africans - black South Africans, to be precise - are rarely ever spotted in other country's newsrooms and subsrooms. That needs to change.

As such, I'm seriously looking for a writing or editing job in Southern Africa, prefe

Work
Articles
Achievements
Activity

Mlungisi's Followers

Lucia Hodges

Graduate

United States

Connect

View profile
Paul McCallan

Independent Creative Director and Brand Consultant, Paul McCallan

United Kingdom

Connect

View profile

« First ‹ Prev

OOPS - LOOKS LIKE YOU HAVE JAVASCRIPT OFF. THIS SITE WON'T WORK WITHOUT IT.
NEED HELP IN TURNING IT ON? YOU CAN FIND INSTRUCTIONS HERE FOR YOUR BROWSER.

Mlungisi's Followers

Lucia Hodges

Paul McCallan