African Affairs

The African Affairs editor deals with news and features relating to Africa that would be of interest to the students on the Rhodes Campus.

Overall Purpose of the Position

• Responsible for the gathering and Editing of all African Affairs content for page 10 of the paper.
• Ensure all content is in by deadline
• To ensure all contnent is submitted in the correct format, according to the activate Style guide
• Contributing to planning and design of pages before deadline
• To facilitate meetings with and between the members of your team.
• Act as a mentor, trainer and advisor
• Should any member of your team not adhere to the stipulations of his/her contract, it must be reported to the Staff manager.

Deadline and Meeting structure

An effective meeting schedule can be accommodated within the two week publication cycle of activate. Meeting are held once a week at the discretion of the African Affairs editor, traditionally on a Monday. The first meeting of the cycle has been used for the purpose of the allocation of stories to respective writers/ writing teams.

The second meeting in week two of the cycle can then be used to review stories before their Tuesday deadline. At this meeting drafts of the stories can be handed in for review and discussion. After this process of criticism the stories are completed and submitted before 13.00 on the Tuesday.

Articles

The page generally holds between 3 and 4 articles with a cumulative word count of approximately 1500 – 1700 words.

You will be expected to control your team and ensure they write and submit factual articles bi-weekly. On receiving articles you need to:

1. Read over them

2. Edit Minor errors

3. Send it back for revision if there are major errors.

4. Verify that the facts are correct and the format matches that in the activate style guide.

Team management

Teams can be managed and extentions afforded if necessary, however it is your responsibility to ensure the stories are in on time without fail. The burden of thinking of article ideas and angles falls primarily on your shoulders, story ideas can however be discussed and developed at weekly meetings, with constructive input from group members subject to your mediation.

Team motivation and contact

Team motivation is an integral component of the success of the African Affairs section. It is your responsibility to ensure the ‘team spirit’ is maintained, as motivated teams are more likely to attend meetings regularly and produce thorough articles.

Your encouragement, constant and efficient contact with team members and to a limited extent the development of personal contact with your individual members in order to create an effective rapport is essential to this process. They need you as much as you need them and your close contact with them is essential in order to keep them informed.

In this regard email is your best friend. Stay in constant contact with your team and be willing to assist promptly when necessary.

Standards

The submitted articles must be in compliance with the activate style guide stipulations. Ensure that when people are quoted their full names and positions/degrees are given, that all sources are reliable and appropriately referenced and that all information is accurate. It is your job to help and assist those members who do not produce work according to standard.

Pictures and Cartoons

It is your job to liase with the pictures editor in order to discuss story angles and what pictures would be best suited to which stories. The African Affairs page also carries a cartoon and close contact with the cartoonist is necessary, providing him/her with rough drafts of the stories well before his/her deadline so the cartoons can be in on time and accurate with regard to the respective article it accompanies.