World attention on South Africa yet again - 28 Nov 2011

It's not just because of COP17 and CMP7, which started in Durban today, Monday, 28 November 2011, that all eyes are once again on South Africa. In the past few days, the outcry and outrage over the Protection of Information Bill and Black Tuesday have gone global, too, and then our communications industry have also managed to attract attention, both positive and negative.

Last Thursday, Blackriver FC and Retroviral Digital Communications launched the Last Dictator Standing TV ad as part of Nando's festive season campaign. This has truly gone global virally - combined, YouTube has already had over 554 000 views and the ad has been mentioned on Time, Boing Boing and Huffington Post.

Then there's been the PR disaster of the @DurexSA Twitter account... from the sexist bad jokes uttered at the start of the 16 Days of Activism for No Violence Against Women and Children campaign to the eventual apology... in which the client named and shamed the agency responsible for the tweeting. *facepalm*

In other news, SA motion picture producer Helena Spring has won the film rights to Lauren Beukes's second novel Zoo City, the Joburg-set science fiction/cyberpunk/urban fantasy thriller that has garnered critical acclaim, huge sales figures and multiple awards this year, including the 2011 Arthur C Clarke award. Beukes, a South African author, scriptwriter and journalist, says she's "thrilled that it's being produced in SA - for an international audience."

Media24's Afrikaans daily newspapers Volksblad (Bloemfontein) and Die Burger (Cape Town) have also this month quietly gone live with a fresh look. Read more about these design and layout tweaks on American visual journalist Charles Apple's blog here and here. Rapport and City Press launched their redesigns towards the end of 2009 and during 2010 respectively, and Beeld (Johannesburg) will shortly be showing off its facelift, too.

Lastly, can you believe there are only two weeks left of newsletters for this year? Monday 12 December will our last day of newsletters for 2011, and we will resume again on Monday, 9 January 2012. News will, of course, continue to be posted daily on our portals, except perhaps between Christmas and New Year.

Sterkte!
Simone Puterman (@SimoneBiz)
Managing editor

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