Health-e News is an award-winning print and TV health news service providing content to South African news outlets.

After poor stewardship left the news organisation on the ropes during a global health crisis caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, drastic changes in both the news strategy, digital design, and tech infrastructure needed to be implemented.

Bibi Aisha Wadvalla, an award winning health and science journalist, took the reigns of the ailing newsroom in July, 2021, and brought me on board as her trusted tech-consigliere.  Over multiple brainstorming sessions on Zoom between Johannesburg and Brisbane, we plotted a path to re-establish the news organisation as one of the country’s most trusted source for health news.

• A complete revamp of the design to enable integrated video, podcasts, and interactive storytelling.
• An exhaustive audit of the organisations digital assets and cybersecurity vulnerabilities.
• Ensuring the website POPIA cookie compliant (South Africa’s GDPR).
• Training the two newsrooms in Cape Town and Johannesburg from Brisbane over Zoom on the WordPress CMS, digital publishing, and Cyber Awareness Training.
• Everything SEO from Google Webmaster Tools to tinkering with the permalink structure
•  Supercharging Health-E News digital impact of “Our Health”–which empowers an army of citizen journalists in townships and the countryside to report on the health crisis gripping South Africa.
• Migrate to a “mobile first” strategy to get health news onto the phones of South Africa’s most marginilised communities.
• Quite a bit more… 😉