Reporting on the South African Lottery [Webinar]
An ongoing, four-year-long investigation into the South African Lottery has exposed maladministration and corruption running into hundreds of rands. The investigation has been led by Raymond Joseph from GroundUp and Anton van Zyl from Limpopo Mirror.
Key to exposing the corruption was a search tool built by civic tech non-profit OpenUp, containing details of 18 years of Lottery grants scraped from PDFs of National Lotteries Commission (NLC) annual reports. This has made Lottery grants transparent and simple to check which organisations have received grants, how much they got, and when.
The NLC disburses around R1.5-billion a year to so-called “good causes” and in light of what has transpired, it is vitally important that journalists play a watchdog role and that reporting about the Lottery goes beyond the usual diet of press release-driven stories about bumper jackpots and anonymous big winners.
We are offered two free webinars focussing on how to report on the Lottery courtesy of a grant from the Indigo Trust. The first, aimed at community journalists, was on September 28, and the second one, for mainstream media (this recording), was on September 30, 2021.
Joseph and van Zyl have both won several journalism awards for their Lottery reporting. Besides hands-on training on how to use the new tool, they also share tips and insights on how they have gone about their reporting and the free tools they use for their investigations.
SA Lottery Tool here: https://salotterytool.org.za/
Blog about the new tool: https://bit.ly/3DFQt9z