ABSTRACT

In 2010, Heather Robertson became editor of The Herald newspaper based in Port Elizabeth in the Nelson Mandela Bay Metropole (the largest city in the Eastern Cape in South Africa). She immediately realized that the task of growing the paper’s readership meant tackling head-on the severe problems of the city’s enduring apartheid configuration. Robertson forged an alliance with the Centre for Non-Racism and Democracy at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University. Together the paper and the research unit began to conduct a series of listening exercises across the city to elicit and pay attention to the voices of the poor and invisible. This has had profound positive effects on the newspaper’s understanding of its place in the city and provides extraordinary insight into how to do journalism in such complex circumstances.