About us
Community Media Network, better-known as CMN, is a dynamic digital news platform that intentionally caters for society’s most important stakeholders – local communities, the grassroots.
Too often local communities never get to tell their own stories. Instead, national and international news media situated far away from the communities has usurped the privilege to tell their stories, oftentimes with inconsistencies and glaring inaccuracy.
CMN seeks to right this wrong. We regard this as our moral duty. For the uninitiated, we are represented in all of South Africa’s nine provinces through local media in the form of newspapers, local community radio stations as well as provincial Television stations.
Through CMN’s digital presence, we strive to weave together perennially fragmented stories of our people amid our nascent democracy, and present them in a coherent format that reflects appreciation of our complex challenges. Through CMN, our stories are told under a single umbrella through the hard-work of local reporters – trained and budding – and told with notable passion, commitment and dedication.
At the centre of CMN’s community news coverage strategy is the love of truth, fairness, balanced reporting and conscientious journalism that empowers, and not disenfranchise.
We pride ourselves as a news organization of patriots whose love for their nation beyond reproach and whose commitment to humanity is a norm.
Province by province, we segment our news offerings in a way that readers can go to any part of the country or world – and still find CMN to be a preferred medium to appraise themselves about the goings-on at their towns, cities or villages – even when they may be physically far away from their place of origin.
Indeed, our readers could be sitting at any corner of the universe but CMN, thanks to the power of technology, enables them to access their local news irrespective of geographical distance.
Furthermore, we pay a particular attention to developments from the African Union (AU) HQ in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, as well as throughout the borders of all the 54 states that maketh our beautiful continent.
We intentionally commit ourselves to playing a meaningful role in the reporting and dissemination of information from the SA government through various available outlets, including the Presidency and Government Communications and Information Services (GCIS), among others, as well as private sector generated news. We do all these with a clear conscience: The love for our country and care about the world, and also recognition of the importance of knowledge through reported information.
We believe that CMN has been born to plug this glaring gap in the media. Henceforth, community news are packaged like never before, under one roof, thus ensuring a strategic offering of a one-stop shop for SA’s local community news. We hope our readers will find CMN truly valuable, irresistible and dependable through its provision of timeous news and current affairs, sports, arts and culture, politics and all there is to offer in a way that is evidently respectful and responsible. Thus we welcome all on board. We urge you to subscribe to CMN, and give us regular feedback. There is always room for improvement. We’re in this together. Buckle up.
Editors-in-Chief Note
For way too long, community media in South Africa has been fragmented and incoherent. Unsurprisingly, its impact has never reached full potential. We live in a country where the majority live in the rural areas, far away from the cities. Equally, our cities are overflowing with millions of citizens in pursuit of a better life. Amidst a myriad of competing interests, dissemination of accurate information should be non-negotiable. In this sense, the role of journalism cannot be over-emphasized.
We at the Community Media Network (CMN) believe we’ve come with an answer. Journalism as a practice has rules of engagement. Information need to be corroborated. Subjects of stories deserve to be given the right of reply. Reporters are required to be morally upright and ethical at all material times. Journalism is no social media. The two may be common in that they both deal in information. However, handling of information differs markedly between a news reporter and a social media information poster.
The emergence of CMN, we believe, will empower our people throughout the nine provinces of SA. After all, we have presence in every of corner of the country (read About CMN).
We have collaborated with all local newspapers, local community radio stations and provincial TV stations in order to tell our stories under one roof – CMN. In this way, our readers and viewers wherever they are in SA or abroad can find news about their province of choice in CMN. This is one of the major advantages of technology. It connects people and communities in ways never seen before.
Handled responsibly and great care, technology can be an unmatched tool for development in modernity. As someone once said: “Poison in the hands of the wise can turn to medicine, just like medicine in the hands of a fool can turn to poison.”
The great collaboration of the local media to come under one digital umbrella that is CMN will, in our humble view, serve our nation beyond description. Information is king, or queen. Reliable information that is disseminated with journalistic principles will benefit our people greatly.
In CMN, we believe we are witnessing the birth of great change, good change that will connect people and places, villages and cities alike. Through a digital news platform such as CMN, we are doing away with distance between people and communities. A civil servant from Mthatha in the Eastern Cape who works in Johannesburg can read about their local news in CMN effortlessly. A nurse from Soweto working in London can read all about their community of origin in CMN without much ado. Let me reiterate: At CMN, we connect people, and places. We hope you will turn CMN into your primary source of news and information. Through a large dedicated team of reporters and editors, we hope to make a difference in our beloved South Africa, and beyond. Truly I tell you, CMN has been born as a force of good.