What It's All About

In my lifetime I've seen a lot of things die: cassette tapes, VCR players, telephone books, skorts.

And soon, after a long convalescence, newspapers will probably join this list.

Why then, you might ask, would we want to make a newspaper? Why invest our time in a dying form? In the words of the EIC, the concept behind this project is to affirm the newspaper form while at the same time challenging it fundamentally. The end product will be a mix between literature and journalism. Part fact and part fiction. It'll be situated in a specific time and place, May 11-18, 2008/South Africa, in an effort to examine the xenophobic attacks from other angles than those previously explored.

Ultimately, the goal "is not to produce a newspaper but to propose a newspaper. To rethink it conceptually, by taking the newspaper infrastructure and putting it in the hands of artists."

This will be an epic task. We've started the Newsroom blog to document the process.