Here's a page turner: M-Net as a pay-TV broadcaster in South Africa is also interested in (gasp!) books.
Yep. True. Although M-Net is in the business of television, the pay-TV operator is also supporting and working very hard at promoting literacy under especially underprivileged children across South Africa in a project entitled M-Net Naledi Children's Literacy Project which is growing every year.
At the other end M-Net is also supporting more advanced literary aspirations: rewarding South African authors in all languages for excellent new novels in a broad range of categories through the annual M-Net Literacy Awards.
But why? Why would M-Net be supporting books and the written word if its main business is the visual video world? Well, where do those visual video stories come from and how do they get to the screen? Through writers of course. Through scripts, and creative writing, and screenplays, and imagination and storytellers.
Because every on-air story or show starts with a script and because every TV industry is only as strong as its writers, that is why M-Net is investing in reading, writing, literacy and promoting a reading culture in South Africa.
"What M-Net does is to tell stories," said Patricia can Rooyen, M-Net CEO at Friday's M-Net Literary Awards 2012 where the pay-TV broadcaster also talked about the pay-TV operator's growing M-Net Naledi project.
"It's stories that make our business so successful and sustains us. That's why we continue to support these awards. We believe that anything - a novel, a script for a series - is what helps to make our business tick," she said.
The M-Net Naledi Children's Project started in 2010 to enrich the lives of young children in underprivileged schools and helping to teach them to read. Where the project started off with 300 children in 2010, it has since grown to 1 500 kids in 5 provinces across South Africa.
This year the M-Net Naledi Children's Project was extended to include the Sive School for the Deaf in the Eastern Cape. This year the Sive School received a fully-equiped library, built from a shipping container crate which looks amazing and seems like such a brilliant idea to take books and reading and helping to foster a reading culture in remote and under-serviced areas in South Africa.
Earlier this year with a group of journalists I visited another school near Poortjie in Gauteng where M-Net is helping to bring reading and literacy to young, bright and excited primary school children whose world lights up when their teacher tells them stories and they do groupwork from their precious workbooks and story books M-Net gave them.
Covering the news - having really done every kind of story in more than a decade as a hard news journalist - hardly gets to me or makes me emotional. But when I visited that school, I had to go stand outside around the corner for a little while because I came very close to crying.
It was very emotional seeing children who would have had no chance to ever read really great books and being exposed to the wonder and joy and growth which comes from reading, get great instruction and that opportunity to have the world of books - and the world - being opened for them.
I felt if there's a company or corporation who isn't just throwing money at some corporate social investment scheme or plan because they have to but who is really, really serious and thoughtful and giving money and resources and energy to a worthwhile plan with intent, that it's M-Net with its literacy projects like the Naledi Children's Literacy Project.
Besides setting up two reading corners in under-resourced schools in Gauteng and Mpumalanga, M-Net under its M-Net Cares banner also has a book collection drive to reach children outside the 12-week programme.
So, next time you switch on your television to watch M-Net, you might remember that this TV giant is also into reading. And in a way in which it not just matters, but actually makes a real difference.
