In late 2008, the online team at the Daily Dispatch in East London, South Africa, won the country's prestigious inaugural Vodacom Award for their online reporting on the outbreak of a major water-borne virus in a remote rural corner of the country. Some 144 babies eventually died as a result of government incompetence, poverty and hospitals unable to cope with a stream of patients.

Here, Daily Dispatch's Online News Editor Jan Hennop describes the story and what conditions are like in the field in rural Africa. He also discusses a number of challenges his team faced, and provides tips for journalists dealing with similar hardships in the field:

"The first trickle of stories about something being seriously amiss in a remote corner of South Africa's Eastern Cape province within days became a flood.

At first, we heard that at least 15 babies had died within the space of a few weeks. Almost daily, more reports started flowing in that something was seriously wrong in the Ukhahlamba District - a dry and harsh area which encompass South Africa's tallest mountain range, the Drakensberg (Dragon Mountains).

A reporting team consisting of myself, a print reporter and a photographer was put together. Apart from helping to write stories for the paper, I was to also supply a breaking news blog, audio and video footage from Ground Zero.

We hit the road early on a cold April morning.

A week later we returned with a bombshell story that eventually lead to the resignation of the provincial Health minister and had repercussions in the top echelons of the South African government.

This was to be our first outing in the field, and boy, did it provide us with a sharp learning curve...

In online terms April last year seems a lifetime away - but like so many other things in Africa, technology moves slowly with the times and very little has changed since.

Here are some of the challenges we had to overcome to bring the story to our readers. Hopefully these problems and some solutions will be helpful to other online reporters in similar conditions:

Connectivity: The fastest dail-up speeds are still to be found on mobile networks within the major city centres. Mobile providers claim 3.6 MB/sec to be the standard. We still use HSDPA external modems, which connects to our laptops via USB ports.

However, outside the cities, speeds drop dramatically and the best we could manage (if we managed to get a connection at all), was between 128KB and 256KB/sec.

Connection speeds are extremely slow - and there are no Internet cafes "out in the sticks." Even with software to bring down the sizes of our video packages to about 3MB, and zipping files, it still took us ours to transmit video and pics to the office for packaging by our online producer.

Tip: Keep your video clips as short as possible. Edit your video on site, rather than sending long clips for editing to the office. For quick editing, a video camera like the Flipcam has a really funky editing function.
Even if you can't afford to buy one, having a satellite telephone like a Thuraya for transmissions is an ABSOLUTE MUST (As any wire service correspondent can testify to).

Never, ever, size your pictures bigger than 30KB at 72 DPI.

Even with our videos converted to the smallest sizes using things like WMV converter, it took us hours to transmit back to the office. (Our videos were converted to 300kbps, 320x240 at 25fps).

Work on an Internet-based content platform such as WordPress or Drupal, rather than in internal Content Management System. (We have a CMS at the paper called GN3). It's quicker to connect directly to the Net and post the content then spending hours to try and transmit it back to the office via email.

Power supply: Despite charging our equipment at night, there were several days where we had to file either on the trot from our vehicle, or in areas where there were no electricity at all.

Tip: Always find a base to file from as close to the story as you can. Make sure it has power points and a strong mobile signal.

We filed most of our copy from the Hilltop "Hotel" - a dingy dive with a zero rating that made the Bates Motel look positively five star in comparison.

At least the beers were cheap and cold, but we had to fight off several "working ladies" and placate the local football gang with a round of beers. But it had power points and an OK mobile signal (two bars).
We also had a portable power converter that plugged into the car's cigarette socket.

Equipment failure: After our main video camera failed, we had to resort to our back-up, a Canon G7. The G7 is a digital camera that can also shoot video. It has a 10 megapixel lens. Although the quality is not that great, it's fine for online. We are buying Flipcams in the next financial year.

Tip: Especially in harsh conditions (by day, the temperature climbed to 32 degrees Celsius (90 degrees Fahrenheit), at night it dropped to -2 Celsius (28 Fahrenheit) - always make sure you have a hardy back-up.
Apart from morose officials (who tried to cover up the baby deaths), these were a few of the problems that we encountered while doing the story.

We were honoured to receive the Vodacom award in November last year. Apart from the online team winning in its category, the Daily Dispatch also scooped the award for the best print feature category and the overall Journalism of the Year award."

- Jan Hennop