In this episode, Media & Marketing Show host, Hasanain Abdullah engages with former editor, author, media and communication professional, Gasant Abarder.
Gasant Abarder’s Biography includes the following highlights:
Gasant worked for E-news during the early days of ETV from 2000 to 2003.
At Independent Media, he started out as a journalist, and rose up the ranks, where he was Cape Argus Editor from 2009 to 2013. Thereafter he served as the Cape Times editor from 2013 – 2015.
He currently serves as University of Western Cape’s Media, Marketing and Communications Manager.
During the media engagement the conversation touch how, his career evolved from running a newsroom as an editor to managing the University of the Western Cape’s brand. Who could forget the close off greeting, “Gasant Abarder, E- News”. The conversation touched on his role as media journalist and news anchor during the early days of E-News. At Independent Media, he climbed the ladder from crime reporter at the Cape Times to Editor of the Cape Argus. One of the defining moments of his journalistic career was ‘Cape Dignity’, a series that the Cape Argus ran, that gave a homeless person a column.
As a budding author, he penned “Hack with a Grenade”, the late, Eusebius McKaiser described it as a sharp social and political commentary on Cape Town, a book that touched on class, identity, and movements like Fees Must Fall. We chatted about his process in distilling his career into a book, and he has a follow-up book that is in the works. The changing tide of the media landscape where print media numbers are decreasing, and the conversation touched on the future of media in South Africa.
As a devoted father to daughters who play soccer, he finds himself involved in the social outreach projects in the form of “Reboot” as a means to give poor communities access to kit that is required on the playing ground.
