Columnist competition highlights users’ voices

News24’s columnist competition, which has been running since mid-March 2007 and closes end of April, has been aimed at discovering new writing talent, with the winning entry to receive a six-month column-writing contract with News24 worth R6000.

The competition will be judged by well-known columnists Jon Qwelane, Marianne Thamm, Chris Roper and News24 editor Jannie Momberg.

“Our users have been sending us their opinions on daily events for years,” explains Momberg. “This competition is an effort to give these users a bigger voice.

“The advent of the blogging culture in recent years has shown there is a vast pool of excellent writers untapped by the formal media. Our columnist competition is giving them a chance to showcase their talent.”

Quality submissions

“We are very impressed by the quality of the submissions, which are improving by the week. The response from our users has taken us by surprise. The competition has been fierce, with almost 300 entries received from around 100 individual entrants,” says Elan Lohmann, News24 publisher.

“The time taken to craft the well-thought out and executed columns that we have received is a considerable investment of time and energy on the part of our users. Not the sort of thing one fires off on a whim.

Continues Lohmann, “Every day we see hundreds of responses to our articles in the News24 inbox. Since we launched a user comment section last year the response has also been considerable. Most of this valuable opinion goes unnoticed by the rest of our readers. I want to create tangible evidence and a record of the many loyal readers who have been using News24 for the last eight years.”

While time is running out to submit a column for the competition, users will be able to submit columns for publication on News24 after the competition closes.