{"id":47348,"date":"2023-04-14T14:27:46","date_gmt":"2023-04-14T12:27:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/novanews.co.za\/kougaexpress\/hi-world-come-at-me-20230412\/"},"modified":"2023-04-14T14:27:46","modified_gmt":"2023-04-14T12:27:46","slug":"hi-world-come-at-me-20230412","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/novanews.co.za\/kougaexpress\/hi-world-come-at-me-20230412\/","title":{"rendered":"CAT\u2019S EUROPEAN JOURNAL | Hi world. Come at me"},"content":{"rendered":"

Catherine White<\/span><\/strong>\u00a0is an award-winning multimedia journalist, and director of Cat White Media. She has worked for some of the largest news publishers in South Africa in radio, TV, print and online video. Catherine, who is originally from Jeffreys Bay, completed her high school education at Global Leadership Academy (2015) after which she studied Journalism and Media Studies at Rhodes University in Makhanda, and graduated at the top of her class. Her recent move to London, England, is in pursuit of an international journalism career with the hope of returning to South Africa as an African correspondent.<\/h3>\n

Remember when your local Jbay news girl moved to the City of Gold to follow her national journalism coverage dreams? Barely three years later she has opted for another big move: the international world of journalism. <\/p>\n

Wait, why am I talking about myself in the third person, because I can! <\/p>\n

Back to the story, here is why I moved to London, England: After travelling around South Africa, telling national stories for some of the biggest news organisations in the country, I decided to take the next step: from local to national; the next move had to be international. <\/p>\n

\u201cBecause I didn\u2019t want to,\u201d is the first part of my response. You heard me. I did the thing that scared me the most. I\u2019m in a phase of my life when I have two options weighed up in front of me; I choose the one I\u2019m most afraid of, the one where if I fall, I fall really hard. <\/p>\n

This phase won\u2019t last forever, I can assure you. England terrified me, not because I would be in physical danger, but because I feared being bored to death by first-world journalism stories. <\/p>\n

One of the first headlines I read from the local paper, the Watford Observer, read: \u201cSelfish parking on school run\u201d. It had to be a joke. It really wasn\u2019t. That made the front page! The funniest part was that the article was really well written and the paper took people\u2019s concerns seriously, as it should. The local authorities even intervened by updating the road infrastructure around the school after the \u201cincident happened\u201d. <\/p>\n

You can\u2019t make this stuff up and one certainly shouldn\u2019t compare the issues, because they are truly worlds apart, but that doesn\u2019t mean these aren\u2019t important issues to these people. Please keep in mind that I worked as a hard news field reporter in South Africa. If the story isn\u2019t of interest to the entire country, we didn\u2019t tell it. <\/p>\n

Even then, there were countless \u2018big\u2019 stories that simply wouldn\u2019t make the headlines. Looking back, I wouldn\u2019t dream of pitching \u2018selfish parking on school run\u2019 to any newsroom in South Africa. There are simply bigger fish to fry. We wish those were our issues, but ours are much bigger.<\/p>\n

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