The Mdantsane Way is a new kind of online
magazine: authentic, personal and interactive, with engaging long-form
storytelling.
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| The Mdantsane Way Magazine |
The Mdantsane
Way is a journal profiling and documenting the second biggest township
in South Africa-which to us means narrative with a strong sense of place,
character or time. We’ve run stories about the Nelson Mandela Day in Mdantsane,
being a mother, woman and a poet writing in Isixhosa and about the only Old Age
Home in Mdantsane. We believe in the power of positive journalism and we don’t
publish reviews of shops, functions and shopping centers or "Top 10 What
To Do in Mdantsane."
The magazine is published digitally so we can distribute globally,
across borders and cultures, instantaneously. At present we are already
including embedded multi-media content like music, interviews,
video and
slideshows, sharing capabilities and high-resolution imagery.
We
are reader-supported, meaning your donation/grant helps pay to produce the
magazine. The reader is
the publisher at the same time.
The Mdantsane
Way
started as a web magazine in 2010. It was created as a follow up and direct
consequence to a coffee table book of the same name The
Mdantsane Way, we have written and published by now. With the online magazine we
reached out to all the people who have given us their time, patience and their
life stories while working on the book. It was an instrument for us to show
them their own stories live on the web. Two years later we have thousands of
readers in dozens of countries. Our readership grows daily. We write for a
large South African audience as well as for the rest of the world. Our stories
are read in Brazil, Mexico, France, Germany and the Philippines. Our stories
are written by us and by guest authors.
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| Informal settlement in Mdantsane |
What The Future Holds
In Spring 2013 we are relaunching The Mdantsane Way as a unique,
multi-media tablet magazine-designed specifically for the iPad, iPhone, Kindle,
Nook, Galaxy and every other brand of tablet. (You can still read the magazine
like you used to on a computer.) The new format will include pages that look
and turn like a magazine, features that allow readers to interact with us on a
larger scale and several new departments.
Why
Support The Mdantsane Way Magzine?
Until now, we’ve not paid contributors, web designers, journalists
and guest-writers stipend for their work. We’d like to pay them fairly in the
future. Having a budget and receiving funding for The
Mdantsane Way allows us to contract journalists and writers on a full time as
well as a free lance basis and to deliver quality content to our readers. While
a portion of funding will go to administrative costs associated with producing
a journal and maintaining it on the web, more than 65 percent of the budget
goes directly to our writers, artists and designers.
What We Do
Founder and Editor Chocolat Negro has made her
career doing humanitarian work and she worked as a technical advisor in an
international program for the promotion of NGO’s and strengthening of civil
society in the Eastern Cape in South Africa for 4 years. But her real passion
is design, photography and film.
She established The
Mdantsane Way with a group of passionate like-minded writers, guest bloggers,
producers and designers to create a new kind of magazine—something more
engaging, authentic and diverse. The magazine publishes daily, including,
journal excerpts, profiles, conversations, re-views and even notes. We
illustrate stories with found objects brought back from Mdantsane, and include
multi-media elements with each piece. Our photography is of the highest
quality.
We run
a category called South Africa in Retrospective
where we explore South Africa’s past through historical images and documents,
originating from our large archive that we have been building up for years. The
great interest in Mdantsane’s past has inspired us to set up a similar digital
data base of old Mdantsane photos and documents. Very little material about
Mdantsane is available and to create such a data base the families in Mdantsane
have to be visited and interviews have to be conducted. We have started the
research already but we are going to take it to a professional large scale
level.
In the past we’ve given our magazine away for free. To help pay
for the redesign and pay our contributors a fair rate, we need funding and
donations. At a later stage we plan to offer yearly subscriptions.
Why
It Matters
We are in a unique position, in that the borderless nature of the
Internet fits our content and mission perfectly. We are a magazine about the
world of Mdantsane, South Africa’s second biggest township. We distribute
content about Mdantsane to the world. Mdantsane is the
second biggest township in South-Africa, a township that is not very well known
and documented and that stands in the shade of its more famous sisters Soweto
and Khayelitsha. Mdantsane is the undiscovered one. Our magazine is a site that
showcases passionate and talented men and women of all descriptions. For years
we have collected stories and pictures and this is a work of passion. We
document stories of humanity through images and articles.
The Mdantsane Way team values the ties that intercultural exchange foster. Digital
publishing and compelling storytelling allow us to help cultivate those ties—on
a global level. The new tablet edition will allow us to do it more evocatively and
efficiently than ever before.
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