During the last year, Tonya Khoury, MD of ROi Africa, has established herself as one of the most credible sources for media monitoring statistics in South Africa. Since the funeral of former president Nelson Mandela, to date, Tonya is a regular face on some of the foremost media like, SAFM, Carte Blanche, ANN7, Beeld, Associated Press, Rapport and 702, providing reliable and insightful statistics on the Oscar Pistorius Trial, the 2014 FIFA Soccer World Cup, the 2014 Elections, the Olympics, the Nkandla debacle and many more leading news stories.
Khoury recalls how she initially started providing statistics to the media. “I was surprised by the amount of coverage the death of former president Nelson Mandela yielded and decided to share these statistics with the media. After that I started following and analyzing coverage of the Oscar Pistorius Trial I followed it from the start, devoting hours every day to finding new angles to cover to keep publishers and readers engaged, providing them to journalists, and feeding content to social media sites. Every morning and some evenings, daily stats were sent to a growing list of contacts,” she recalls.
At the beginning of the trial, she reached out to the four main media houses who own most of the channels in South Africa. The first publisher to pick up her stats, 702, asked Khoury to read them each morning on the radio show set up to cover the trial. The media quickly contacted her for more information, so they began emailing stats updates once or twice a day. “From there the demand got bigger and bigger, as new news stories and global events broke,” she adds.
According to Mathapelo Matjokana, the producer of the Afternoon Talk with Ashraf Garda Show on SAFM, one of the first media to use Tonya’s statistics on a regular basis, says that, “With the arrival of Khoury’s statistics people were able to understand, for example, the Oscar Trial better as complex legal matters were broken down into simpler terms. It also allowed them to follow the World Cup and Olympics through a bird’s eye view with these analyses.”
Amalia Christoforou, Managing Editor of the Oscar Trial Channel (Carte Blanche) adds that Khoury’s analysis offered a simplified and entertaining comparison, giving a local and global assessment of news around the trial, as compared to other breaking news. Joshua Carstens, producer of Afternoon Drive on Radio 702, says, “It helped me focus on what is important and what the audiences are talking about. In essence it made the scene less cluttered.”
The producer of the Jenny Crwys-Williams Show on Radio 702, Gary Oberholzer, added that, “Certainly for our #OscarExtra presenters to be able to frame the growing or waning media interest, to describe the trends from a bird’s eye view, Tonya’s statistics were crucial. Especially on something as lengthy as this trial.“
Christoforou agrees adding, “”The ROi Africa analysis graphically depicted the way in which the OP trial narrative and news was able to sustain local and international audiences and media attention, which is unusual for a story that has spanned so many months with so much dipping and peaking of elements of interest . A large focus of the Oscar Pistorius Channel was depiction of the way in which the narrative of the trial was digested online through digital media platforms and social media platform users. The ROI Africa stats gave us in-depth analysis of this world and the way in which it was ingesting and delivering the trial story.”
The statistics of ROi also provided the media with new avenues to generate content. Matjokana adds that, before ROi they never used to have a roundup of stories that have made headlines globally throughout the week and when she and presenter, Garda, saw the value that Khoury brought on to the show with updated and reliable statistics, “we realised that it could be of interest to our listeners”.
Garda concurs and adds that, with the detailed, colourful, credible and immediate statistics Khoury set herself above the rest by delivering this information regularly and on the turn. “To add, Khoury was not just the communications spokesperson for the information – she was the embodiment of the statistics. She literally ‘lived’ the statistics, which showed in the way she presented her statistics over the radio. She delivered the stats in a most engaging, spontaneous manner and that’s really important when dealing in the radio and TV space where information must not only be credible but it has to be delivered in a most entertaining way.”
Laura Wiener, 702 Producer, add that what made Khoury’s statistics so crucial is the fact that it was credible – “It is important for us at the Oscar Extra channel that the statistics be credible and accurate as we would not want to be disseminating inaccurate information and statistics to our listeners,” she stresses.
Catrine Malan, freelance journalist of the SABC, echoes this, adding that finding statistics for a case like the Oscar Pistorius Trial, isn’t that hard. “What is hard is finding the experts, who are able to explain and put these statistics into context in a manner that is understandable to even a teenager sitting at home. We found that expert in Khoury. She has the ability to summarise and compare not only the most important but also most talked about statistics out there.”
Garda concurs, adding, “I love the fact that Khoury is adept at delivering the contact via email, then chatting about in air and at the same time tweeting the information. That synergy and convergence of platforms is really important to what I do on air,” he emphasises.
Malan concludes that Khoury’s work has always been spot on. “Especially on the trending topics like Oscar / World Cup, etc. her opinions and analysis was a top quality expert opinion that we will definitely use in the future,” she concludes.
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FOR MORE INFORMATION
Tonya Khoury 073 874 5377
E-mail: tonya@roiafrica.com
Twitter: @tonyaroi / @roiafrica
Facebook: Facebook.com/roiafrica
Website: http://www.roiafrica.com
Author: Tonya K Khoury from ROI Africa.
More Info link: http://www.roiafrica.com
Twitter: @tonyaroi / @roiafrica
Facebook: Facebook.com/roiafrica
Images: For high res version/s of One image/s please contact: ROI Africa.
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