 Colin Bower is the Group Editor of Topco Media, with final editorial responsibility for Top Performing Companies, the Top500, Impumelelo, and Top Women in Business and Government.Colin has spent his professional life in book publishing, in business consulting, and as a writer and journalist. He was managing director of book publisher Juta Gariep and a director of the Juta Group. Prior to that he was a director of Kagiso Publishers. He worked as a journalist on the staff of the Daily Despatch and the Sunday Times newspapers, and has been a frequent contributor on a freelance basis to the Sunday Times, the Mail & Guardian, the Cape Times, and to other media. He was a judge on the Sunday Times Alan Paton Awards (2008), and he is author of the book Open Minds, Closed Minds and Christianity (Aardvark Press). |
|
 Ryland Fisher is a former editor of the Cape Times and has more than 25 years of experience in the media industry. He served several newspapers in senior positions, among them the Sunday Times where he was assistant editor.He is the author of Race, a book dealing with some of the issues related to race and racism in post-apartheid South Africa. This is his second book, with the first one, Making the Media Work for You (2002), providing insights into the media industry in South Africa. He is currently the Executive Chairman of the Cape Town Festival, which he initiated while editor of the Cape Times, and he also acts as a consultant for Global Media Alliance, a media company in Ghana.. Fisher is the former CEO of Sekunjalo Media Holdings (Pty) Ltd, a division of Sekunjalo Investments Limited (SIL), South Africa’s most empowered company in 2006. He is also a former Head of Journalism at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology and continues to lecture in journalism at CPUT. He has traveled extensively abroad including, and was a Rockefeller Research Fellow at the Center for the Study of Public Scholarship at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, from August to December 2003. He also spent five weeks at the Harvard Business School in 1997 where he underwent a course in change leadership. In April 2007, he presented two lectures on race and racism in post-apartheid South Africa at the Athens and Zanesville campuses of Ohio University. He also presented lectures in the journalism and African Studies Departments at Ohio University. In October 2006, Fisher received the Award of Appreciation for Print Media (for Media that Transforms the Public Space) at an international media conference, called Images of Voices and Hope, in New York. This was in recognition of the One City Many Cultures project which he initiated at the Cape Times. He writes a regular column on political issues for Marketviews, a publication of Sharenet. Until recently, he wrote a monthly column for the Big Issue, a magazine distributed by homeless people in Cape Town, and served on the Board of this magazine. He continues to write occasionally for several local and foreign publications, and blogs on the book.co.za and the Mail&Guardian Thoughtleader websites. Fisher serves as a director of the Cape Town Community Housing Company (Pty) Ltd and the Applied Fiscal Research Centre (AFReC) (Pty) Ltd, which trains civil servants in public finance management. He is also a trustee of the St Patrick’s Trust, formed to promote entrepreneurship in South Africa. Previously, he owned and ran Ryland Fisher Communications, a new South African company dedicated to bringing people together in spite of their differences. He was also the Chief Executive Officer of Thinta Media (Pty) Ltd, a media investment company bringing together several editors and former editors of print and broadcast media in South Africa. He was also recently a special adviser to South Africa’s Minister of Justice and Constitutional Development. |
|