The 13th annual No Guts, No Story, No Glory seminar of the Forum of Community Journalists (FCJ) was held at Aventura Loskopdam, Mpumalanga, on Friday.

Journalists and editors from about 50 community newspapers from Limpopo, Mpumalanga and Gauteng converged at the resort to share experiences during their daily work activities and to enhance the primary job of community media as the most important mass communication tool for the community.

Speaker after speaker stressed the importance of community newspapers and gave hints on how the papers can change the immediate living environment of the society.

Former journalist, highly experienced academic and manager Prof Johann de Jager from the Absa Corporate Identity talked about the growth and power of the community press. De Jager completed his doctoral thesis 22 years ago, on the subject of the community press. He said there is no other newspaper that is read as thoroughly as any local community paper. He said the community newspaper must serve its primary function of bringing information to the community. “Human beings have rights to access information and the local media must fulfil this role. We cannot undermine the importance of the local media because they are there to develop the community.”

A senior photographer at Beeld, Alet Pretorius, presented the topic: What Judges are looking for in a winning photograph. She said the primary function of a photo is to inform and she urged journalists to take photos that are as informative as possible. “If your photographs mean nothing to you, how do you expect other people to care about them? Photography is an artistic expression that translates your feelings to readers.”

Owen Cassinga, a senior journalist from the Lowvelder newspaper, gave a firsthand account of his face-to-face encounter with death. He presented on the topic: When a journalist is shot. He gave a moving but horrifaccount of when he was shot and wounded when he was covering a story about a boy who had died at an initiation school in July this year.

The final speaker, Sam Nzima’s topic was: How one photograph can transform your life. He spoke about his experiences ever since he took the Hector Pieterson photograph in 1976.